Hello everyone
I am an individual keyboard developer. I am Cathaylab.
I am developing many many keyboards such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Hakka, Hokkienese, Manchurian, Wu, even Taiwan Autronesian languages. Many languages I even don’t speak one word of them, but for the passion of helping those people, I design keyboards for those people. Because I truly find if I don’t do, probably no one will do my job. If I stop, no one will continue this work.
I almost spend all my spare time to develop the keyboard and it seems like this work will never have an end during my life, because as we know those languages are all very lack of development. I am only one person team. My ability is so small, finish those can take me 10 years.
I don’t have time to find a part-time job because of I almost spend all my time on coding and I don’t have full-time working permission now, as an international student and a refugee. I also don’t have time and resource to love a girl, probably no girls and no people around me can really understand my volunteer work. And I can not get rich through my work. I can only live in a cold and wet room in a shared house at East mid-land. Everyday is boring and endless coding and testing. Those kind of life style really hurts my mentality and make me sad.
I want to truly on the field to spread my works on the Asian land, but because I am an asylum seeker, I can not travel outside of UK before my claim is confirmed, it will last probably 2 years. And I probably can never go to territory of Communist China during my life. That is very crazy, I am only relying on internet source such as wikipedia and youtube video to develop a language keyboard, and I even get many downloads, such as Manchu and Taiwan Austonesian, I know nothing about those two languages but those two keyboard get the most downloads because the group of user is large and my keyboard design is so effective.
I wonder how can I earn a living through my work, at least I should get the money to pay my rent and food.
I wonder should I change an environment, for example which place or college in UK can give me better resources. I am in Nottingham now, there are basically no one can understand on my work.
How can I earn money through my work in keyman developer and language development? Or it is just impossible?
Can I post my paypal account in my keyboard? Although I think possibly few people will be willing to pay. How can I get funding and financial support?
I was born in 2000. I want to live in a warm and large house, get married, and have my family and kids. I find I really treat myself too harsh in this volunteering job. I even broke up with one girl in a remote relationship because of I spend to much time in coding and don’t have time to care about her.
Today my family bank transfer some many every month, I know it can not last long after my parents get old and those money can only allow me to live in those kind of poor life.
And from technical aspect, my keyboard developing is so slow. The Keyman IME developing system is not on the way and I don’t know how to develop a true IME on keyman. I can only use a very low efficiency way to type Kanji, It spend me a lot of time to make a keyboard. I’d better have a team and the team can do a lot of things for me, but at that moment I only have me, I often feel be overwhelmed and helpless.
Can someone help me? Or can you give me some advices?
Thank you everyone