THE LONG
WAY HERE.
From the Radio Shack floor in New Orleans to the frontiers of AI. A life spent around computers. Now a public journey into the code behind them.
Begin the story ↓This is not a beginner's story.
It began long before a coding course or a modern development environment. A kid setting up and demonstrating a TRS-80 at a Radio Shack managed by his uncle. Watching programming at the University of New Orleans. Bringing a Commodore 64 lab to life at school.
The tools changed. The curiosity never left.
A personal account based on recollection. Illustrated scenes are interpretive, not archival photographs.
The Radio Shack floor.
Before home computing became ordinary, there was a TRS-80 and an uncle's Radio Shack. Setting machines up, showing customers what they could do, realizing technology could be both explored and explained.
Watching the code.
At UNO as a high school freshman, watching friend Eric work with what may have been COBOL and Fortran. The realization: there was another world behind the screen, and people could tell the machine what to do.
A lab of our own.
Setting up the Commodore 64 computer lab in high school. More than encountering a machine, helping create an environment where other students could encounter it too. Graduating during Christmas break.
Pixels meet production.
The Amiga Video Toaster entered the media production workflow. A bridge between pictures, editing, storytelling, equipment and computation. Technology wasn't separate from creative work. It became another production instrument.
Learning by teaching.
Working in the computer labs at Delgado Community College's City Park Campus and UNO, tutoring students, faculty, administrators and staff. The most powerful technical lesson may have been helping someone else understand.
The machine can help write the code.
ChatGPT. Claude. Coding agents. AI can now draft, test and revise software, but it still needs people to decide what matters, verify what's true and take responsibility for what ships. It's time to go deeper than being a user.
From HTML
to FDE.
A public field notebook, not a claim of mastery. Each chapter will show the work, mistakes, revisions and evidence along the way.