Ask HN: How to survive as a homeless programmer in the winter (AB, Canada)?
I've been looking for a job/contract for 6+ months but last week I was evicted and lost mostly everything I own except my laptop, a few pairs of clothes, and a few Raspberry Pis. I was working at a nice company but I got "poached" after one saw my AGPL project, I decided to leave the nice place since new place looked like a better fit. Turns out they wanted to take advantage of my open-source work that I've poured my free-time into for 3+ years + seen interest from investors/VC firms. They tried to build their product from it and I wasn't able to tolerate that so I screwed myself by not continuing work with them + not having anything else lined up...

I've been trying to get "social support" through Alberta's online social services for over a month now and I even went so far as to walk 5 hours (round-trip, I have no car/license) to a physical Alberta Works center but I have not received any reason as to why I haven't had any response, email, or really any followup in any form from them despite trying to reach out to them through every means they provide. I also brought up the fact I had security concerns in regards to their systems when I went in person but that was brushed aside/ignored (to be fair, perhaps there's an official way to submit concerns? idk, I've just been very stressed and frustrated as of late). Funnily enough, a few days before I got evicted I received a letter telling me their systems were hacked a month ago and my SIN, DOB, all my personal info was stolen from their systems so now also worrying about my identity being stolen.

CW: trauma dumping, sorry..
I grew up alone for the first 8 years of life with an addict father. I've been diagnosed with PTSD. My mother left me to escape the abuse herself. When she regained custody it was better but she was a foster kid herself. She won't provide me a couch to sleep on + she kicked me out after my episode of psychosis years ago. I've been on my own since. I don't have friends/family I can turn to, some of that is partly my bad choices but I also got a crappy hand in life. I really hope a VC opportunity/job application will work out soon. I wasted lots of $ on a psychologist for 6 years to try to "heal" (now I think 80%? of that "industry" is BS.), was told not to worry about being homeless + turned out that they're into astrology.. + recommended against my decision to stop seeing them after I saw red flags, I made the mistake of listening and wasted more time/money due to loneliness :/
End CW

I'm kind of at my wits end now. I was able to social engineer myself into being a 'visitor' at a hospital for the past week but security got suspicious + said I have to spend more time visiting and less time lounging. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tonight + I'm scared of having my laptop stolen. I'm looking for work in anything now. I know how to program, how to learn/adapt "quickly" (so can most people in this industry I'd guess lol), write ETL pipelines, develop websites from front-to-back, reverse engineer at a 'basic' level, deploy to Linode/AWS/DO/Azure, basic DevOps, Bash scripting, Go, Python, TS/JS, etc. But I have no official degree/certs. I tend to get along with people I talk to IRL but I'm not great at forming long-term IRL relationships except online.Not sure why I'm sharing this with HN, doesnt seem fitting but this is one of the few places I've been able to find like-minded people who think/share cool things on topics I like, I've always struggled to find that IRL :/ Anyways, I'm going to go and try to find/steal some food now, I'll likely not be back online to reply to comments anytime soon. I hope I'll be able to survive tonight/the next few weeks until it warms up :/ I hope none of you screw up/have to go through something like this

Take care,
- Krowfooten (a non-public pseudonym - can also email me at -> simplelogin.nxw38@aleeas.com - love to talk tech/can share more about my project in a 'private' place :)