From a young age, I've had a fascination with the world around me and how things behave. Some of my earliest memories entail taking apart household items, asking way too many questions and—most vividly—sticking a quarter into an electrical outlet because I wanted it to give me a gumball like the machine at the pizza place.

I was born with a condition that affects my vision and ability to recognize objects and people by sight. In first grade, the Sparrow Club held a fundraiser to purchase a braille-based computer so that I could more easily complete assignments and access information.

I had that BrailleNode MPower BT for around 8 years, and it gave me my respect and admiration for computer science. I can remember being 6 or 7 and figuring out the clipboard functionality, copying and pasting the same line of text over and over. First once, then twice, four times, eight, sixteen, over and over until I filled up all 128 MB of volatile memory.

A little later I can recall sending repeated BlueTooth pairing requests to my mom's old Windows Vista laptop—back when Windows would allow requests at any time and badger the user with an annoying dialog box. To this day I can recite the listing from KeySoft's "main menu" in order and by heart.

Finally, I remember re-programming theKeyNote Gold speech synthesizer to replace the name of one of my teachers with "goofball". After I claimed not to know what happened, hours were spent on the phone with tech support to diagnose the "problem."

As I got older, technology improved at an astounding pace. In 2013 I replaced the $5,000 specialized BrailleNote with a $500 iPad. Zoom, VoiceOver and other accessibility features are making ordinary technology more and more usable for people with vision impairments.

If you fast-forward through my mischievous years as a teenager using technology for all the wrong purposes (such as sending IR signals to school projectors to muddle with math lectures), you'd find me learning React and modern web technologies on my MacBook Pro.

While I still rely on screen readers and magnification software to do my work, I feel I've come a long way with technology despite the odds. I've contributed to dozens of open source projects, started a few of my own and built a career leveraging blockchain technology for the greater good. I couldn't be more excited for my next chapter of leadership and creativity.