While delivering the news, my father told me his doctor had given him two years to live, ten months ago. I don't want to repeat the same mistake. I want to spend the next year with him, fulfilling his dream of a cross-country road trip, something which he gave up on to raise me as a single father.

However, I cannot afford to do this. I did odd jobs here and there, but the kind of small-time contract work I dabbled in has dried up with the advent of LLMs, and my own savings are insufficient.

I would be incredibly grateful to be given a job opportunity with remote, flexible hours that would allow me to work while fulfilling my father's dream. I am not a conventional hire. I didn't finish high school, I don't have a formal employment history. I can offer a portfolio of personal projects but my resume is the kind that gets auto-rejected.

I can be incredibly useful, if you'll give someone the system overlooks a chance. I've spent 12+ hours a day for years programming all kinds of random things, most with no market value but which have developed my skills tremendously. I have experience with just about anything you can name, from embedded assembly and bare metal devops to Android apps and web dev and everything in between. On the off chance I don't, I'll learn anything you can throw at me. I simply love programming for programming's sake. I can wrangle a chatbot if that's what the job demands, but I prefer to use them for research and brainstorming and hand roll the best code I can myself, delivering something of far higher quality than you can get with prompting.

I have confidence in my own skills and that I can eventually break into the market on my own merits. But I don't have 'eventually'. My mother is dead and my father is dying. It's my own fault things ended up this way, not being the child I should have been for them earlier, and these regrets are mine to bear, but all I can do is ask for help to prevent another regret being added to the pile. I promise I will make it worth your while if you can give me a chance.

(A contact e-mail address is in the profile. Please forgive the anonymous account, it shames me to be begging like this... )