May 4 is a special day. Not only because it’s Star Wars day, but because it was on that day in 2015 that I was hired for my first full-time job. Today marks one decade of being employed.

I don’t suppose ten years of being employed is a milestone most people think about. And why should they? Most people work for many years—decades. One decade isn’t so special.

But it’s a sentimental milestone for me, a man with spinal muscular atrophy who, back in 2014—six years unemployed out of grad school—was close to giving up on ever being part of the workforce. After being passed over time and again, I began to believe that my disability was too great an obstacle.

No one will ever hire me, I thought. They won’t take a chance on me when there are plenty of people my age with more experience who don’t have the severe physical limitations I do. They won’t hire me because I make them feel uncomfortable and they don’t know how to act around me. I know that feeling because, inexplicably, I’m the same way. If I meet someone with a severe disability, I too feel uncomfortable and don’t how to act. So how can I blame them?

But all along there was another voice. Quiet and sometimes drowned out, but never fully silenced, it reminded me that I had a knack for making websites. I needed to improve, yes, but I knew my website-making abilities were good and I knew they would get better. More importantly I loved it. I had the bug. It was the perfect medium to work in, melding visual creativity, writing, systems, and problem solving all into one. There was no way I was not going to be making websites.

So make websites I did, any chance I got, for anyone who would take them and (sometimes) pay for them. Eventually I had evidence I could point to and say, “I can make websites like this.” And long though it took, someone finally noticed.

What to do when you can’t do anything

I went through the same phases many kids went through. When I pondered what I wanted to be when I grew up, I thought of the usual suspects—police, firefighter, doctor. I naively assumed I could do anything, and since no one told me otherwise, I went on happily through my childhood assuming I would do what anyone else would.

By high school, reality began setting in. Okay, clearly I’m not going to be a construction worker. What am I good at? What do I like? Can I get paid to play video games? What even is that—video game tester? Alas, these were the olden days before streaming was a way people could get paid to play video games.

I knew even back then in the late 90s that my future was intertwined with the computer—that humble, dorky machine with its quaint desktop metaphors laid atop a promising blue sky. I remembered that first fascination of using Windows 95 and playing solitaire and pinball. I remembered being amazed by the Weezer video on the Windows 95 installation disc. As a kid in the 90s, I immediately and intuitively realized that the computer was a creation machine. I began using it for art and writing. I didn’t know then just how important the computer was going to be in my life, but I knew I would be using one in whatever job I got.

The world wide web

As a kid in the 90s, my first experience with the internet was using AOL via a 14kbps dial-up connection. It was an embarrassingly long time before I knew there was a web outside of AOL. In high school, a friend of mine was into sports writing and he published his articles on a website. That was my first taste of web publishing and I thought it was so cool. I started helping him with his website and I began publishing my own website about my favorite freeware games.

I started with WYSIWYG builders and sketchy free hosting. But in the fall of 2005—the start of my junior year of college, majoring in business information systems—I took a course that in hindsight I can say was life-changing. It was Advanced Languages I with Dr. Rodney Pearson. In that course he taught JavaScript and HTML^[1] and I couldn’t get enough. I eagerly looked forward to homework assignments (for the first time ever) and I would complete them as quickly as I could without procrastination (which I rarely did for other courses). Even the interactive coding exams were fun.

That course sealed the deal—I was going to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and I was going to be a ✨ Web Designer ✨. I took to converting with voracity my fledgling web empire from WSYIWYG slop to handcrafted HTML and CSS. I felt the power coursing through my veins with every click of the refresh button. And in August 2005, using a friend’s credit card, I purchased this very domain, blakewatson.com.

I spent the remainder of my college years (including grad school) learning everything I could about web design, which is what I called it back then. I read formative books like Designing for the Web by Mark Boulton. I followed revered professionals like Jeffrey Zeldman on Twitter and read industry publications like A List Apart. I slurped up everything I could about making websites and I continued to build my own. I got started with a new up and coming CMS called WordPress.

Six long years

After grad school I began to apply for jobs. It was tough because Mississippi isn’t exactly a tech hub. We are usually behind in just about any kind of metric, especially ones that are based on technology. But disability programs are notoriously difficult to get on, and each state does them differently. So moving to another state and potentially starting over was not an option I wanted to tackle. I was on a good program that paid for caregivers, and I would need those caregivers if I planned to work. So I was stuck in Mississippi, for better or worse. One promising interview was with that of my alma mater, Mississippi State University.

At least I thought it was promising. After doing pretty well with the technical interview, save for one slightly embarrassing moment, I met with a department head who’s expression as I entered his office told me exactly what was about to happen—I wasn’t getting hired.

No matter, there will be other interviews. And there were. But each one was similar—employers were interested in my work, but upon learning of my disability, they’d pass. At least that’s what it felt like. Maybe that wasn’t it at all. But I didn’t know and as years went on that thought was eating at me.

It wasn’t so bad at first—not having to go to school, not having to go to work; spending my time making websites for fun or just goofing off playing video games. I received a modest SSI check and lived at home with my mother, so there wasn’t a dire need for me to work. And that seemed to fit most people’s expectation of what I should have doing. Nobody would blame me for sitting this mother out.

Nobody but me. My own self-worth seemed inextricably linked to having a job and contributing something to society. Why? Was it part of an American ethos? Was it a biblical imperative? Was it a way to make up for my lack of masculine physicality?^[2] No matter how you look at it, society normally takes a dim view of people who don’t work even though they could. I assumed society figured I couldn’t work but I knew I could and it was killing me. Some nights I’d cry myself to sleep, wallowing in despair, and praying that somehow I’d find a job and be more than a burden to those around me.

In hindsight I can see that I was far too hard on myself. I didn’t give myself enough credit for the things I did manage to accomplish—picking up the odd freelance job making a website, volunteering with a local nonprofit to produce nearly all of its media. Making connections, learning.

We still have our dreams

In one of the most defining moments of my unemployed years, I was ghosted by a company after interviewing in person for three hours and being told that the decision was between me and one other candidate. I took it pretty hard. That year in particular had been rough because I was nearly hired by Automattic, the company that runs WordPress.com (and is currently mired in a controversial legal battle).

In the aftermath of those two events I was inspired by an episode of The Big Web Show and ended up penning a blog post, called We still have our dreams, in which I strengthened my resolve to be a website maker, whether anyone would pay me to do it or not.

That emotional roller coaster defined my six years of unemployment as I careened between the pit of despair and the seed of hope. But as the years passed, despair was winning. Then suddenly…

A mad genius approaches

There weren’t a ton of available web development jobs available in Mississippi. Well, maybe there were more than I thought, but I didn’t know where to look. I did find a handful of marketing agencies and one in particular caught my eye. Mad Genius seemed like an awesome place to work. It looked like a breeding ground for creativity and I experienced FOMO immediately.

I contacted them and interviewed even though they didn’t have an open position. It was a casual interview at a coffee shop with then-interactive-lead Ryan Farmer. It was such a refreshing interview because we mostly talked shop. Ryan complimented my work, I complimented Mad G’s work, and we shared our mutual nerd crush on Chris Coyier and CSS-Tricks.

A year later, they had an opening for an Interactive Designer role and I immediately applied. I got a trial offer and I was ecstatic. They threw me right into the fray and I immediately needed to learn new skills like SVG animation. It was hard, but it was fun.

Several weeks later, on May 4, 2015, I got the full-time offer.

After several years at Mad Genius, I got the opportunity to join MRI Technologies working on hardware management apps for NASA and Collins Aerospace. I’ve been working with the team at MRI since 2019. I’ve loved both of these jobs and learned a ton at each one.

Working with a disability

When you have a disability as severe as SMA, you’re going to run into a number of challenges in work, and in life in general. In the United States, there are disparate programs available to help with it by providing education, career help, and personal care assistance. It’s hard to navigate these programs, and they tend to differ between states, which makes it even more difficult.

I know people with severe disabilities who would work if they had the opportunity, if they didn’t fear losing their benefits, and if someone would give them a chance. I would love to see the situation improve, and I have a little bit of a wish list (unfortunately, government moves at a snail’s pace and some of this stuff is either far away or never going to happen).

• Home and community-based programs—the ones that supply caregivers to those of us who need them—need to be administered at the federal level, or otherwise in such a way that frees participants to move between states. At present, moving is difficult because of differing state rules and the need to reapply for services.
• We need consistent Medicaid buy-in rules across all states that remove means testing for people with disabilities who are working that require personal care and or other medical necessities to be able to work. I know people who have multiple degrees paid for by state programs who can’t get a job when they graduate because the amount of money they would make would cause them to be ineligible for services, which would then prevent them from working and making the money in the first place.
• Finally, we need better and consistent documentation and application of these rules. Too often it’s confusing bordering on incomprehensible. And that doesn’t just confuse participants. It can confuse government workers who might apply the rules incorrectly.

Looking forward

If someone had told me in 2014 where I would be at in 2025, I would have been shocked. I’m excited to see what lies ahead. I have fears, of course. I have the fear of my condition worsening to the point where I can no longer work. I fear that AI might render my skill set meaningless eventually.

But I still enjoy making websites. And I think I’ll continue to enjoy making websites in the future. Things get bogged down from time to time with framework wars, technical debt, and questionable design trends. But the fundamental principles of building for the web don’t change so rapidly. When I published HTML for People last year, the primary inspiration was to tap into that feeling I had those 20 years ago now, when I was learning HTML and putting it on the web for the first time. That magic is just as relevant now as it was then, maybe even more so because it stubbornly eschews the walled gardens and exploitive practices of the big corporate platforms that thrive today.

We can always look for ways to improve our work for the people that use it. I’ll never tire of putting the humanity into my work. And I’ll never lose my wonder for the web.

I’m grateful to be working in this field, and to all the people along the way that helped me cross this ten-year milestone.

May the fourth be with you.