I’m planning to be homeless. On purpose, with a calculator I wrote myself.

Let me get the disclosures out of the way, because they’re load-bearing: I’m legally blind. I’m autistic. I have Crohn’s disease. I’ve also been shipping software professionally for twenty years — pair-programmed Objective-C at Asynchrony, built the poll book most of this country votes on at KnowInk, and currently run a self-hosted platform off a single-board computer that serves this very page. Hold both of those paragraphs in your head at once. Most people can’t. They meet the first paragraph and round the second one down.

The house

I live in my mother’s house. It’s hoarded. There’s mold. The basement flooded and stayed that way. There is rotten food in rooms where food should not be.

Here’s what that means with Crohn’s: mold isn’t a smell, it’s an exposure. A house like this isn’t shelter that happens to be unpleasant — it’s a slow, continuous medical event that I sleep inside of. When I say a tent might be healthier, that is not rhetoric. I’ve done the air-quality math the way I do all math: honestly, because lying to yourself about inputs just moves the error bar to somewhere more expensive.

The queue is built backwards

I’ve asked for help before. Programs, lines, intake forms. Nothing moved. It took me years to understand that this wasn’t bad luck — it’s the mechanism. Housing assistance runs on a triage system called coordinated entry, and if you’re sheltered in someone else’s house — what HUD calls “doubled up” — you are scored as fine. It does not matter what’s growing on the walls. There is no field on the form for “the basement is a biohazard.”

The moment I walk out with a tent, I become “Category 1: literally homeless.” Add documented disabilities and I jump to the highest priority tier. Read that again: the system’s help unlocks after the tent, not before. The queue only sees you once you’ve already fallen. So the tent isn’t just an exit from the mold — it’s the key that turns the lock. If I do this, I do it with every intake appointment pre-booked, so that night one in the tent is also day one on the list, in the queue their own rules force me into.

I don’t think the people who designed this have ever stood in it.

The engineering

Here’s where it gets fun, because physics — unlike intake systems — is a fair opponent. It tells you the price up front and never changes the terms.

My entire generation capacity is 200 watts of panel: one 100 W panel on a Jackery Explorer 300, one on a Renogy controller feeding a Group 27 marine battery. In Missouri sun that’s about 750 watt-hours a day in summer, maybe 450 in winter. Usable storage across both banks: roughly 800 Wh, if I respect the lead-acid’s 50% floor — and you always respect the floor, because a marine battery holds a grudge.

A MacBook workday is 300–400 Wh. Phone-as-hotspot is another 50 — and hotspot it must be, because Starlink’s 60-watt dish would eat two-thirds of my daily budget by itself. A DC fan for the Missouri summer, an LED light, and the ledger closes at roughly 650 Wh against 750 generated. It fits. Barely, honestly, with cloudy days settled at the library like a gentleman.

No inverter, before anyone suggests one. An inverter is a 10–15% tax plus idle draw for the privilege of converting DC to AC so my laptop can convert it back. A $25 12-volt USB-C PD adapter runs the MacBook straight off the marine bank. Refusing unnecessary conversions is the whole game at this scale — every watt is 2× leverage when the sun is your income.

I ran all of this through watts, the electricity calculator I built — it does battery runtime and solar-aware outage math now, so I pointed it at my own life. Here’s the actual summer plan, live, public, interactive. Toggle my devices on and off and watch my margins move. That’s what transparency looks like when an engineer does it.

The doors that don’t care where you sleep

Writing this partly for the next disabled dev who searches these terms at 3am: some doors are disability-based, not housing-based, and nobody at them asks whose name is on a deed.

• Centers for Independent Living — housing navigation run by disabled people. Not a generic intake line. Different species entirely.
• State rehabilitation services for the blind — vocational rehab exists to keep you employed. Assistive tech, work supports, caseworkers who open other doors.
• Blind-category SSDI — statutory blindness has its own rules, including an earnings limit near $2,700/month. You can work and still qualify. Most people who “got denied” were never assessed under the right category.
• A doctor’s letter stating your housing worsens your condition. One page. It converts you from “waitlist” to “documented medical necessity” in the only language these systems parse.

The point

I was told, more than once and with kindness, that people like me should manage expectations. Meanwhile I run production infrastructure from inside a hoard, budget my survival in watt-hours, and write this on a machine powered by a battery I will shortly be carrying into the woods.

Transparency isn’t bravery. It’s cheap — it costs one blog post. What’s expensive is the assumption tax disabled people pay every day: the rounding error where “legally blind, autistic, Crohn’s” gets evaluated and “twenty years of shipped systems” gets discarded as noise. I’m publishing the whole ledger — the platform, the API bills, and now this — because receipts are the one argument that survives contact with low expectations.

The sun gives Missouri 4.7 peak hours a day. The Emperor provides. The rest is engineering.