About Me

Early Years with Computers and Programming

Since I was young, I’ve had an interest in computers and programming. I went to elementary school in the 80s, and my family had a Commodore 64 computer. It was glorious. It was a large, curved plastic box with a keyboard that had a computer in it. You plugged it into a power supply and a color TV. When you turned it on, it showed a bright blue screen with a flashing square cursor, a command prompt. Before you could do anything, you had to enter a command using the Basic programming language. I’ll always remember that blue start-up screen. We also had an IBM-compatible computer that had a yellow and black screen that my father used for writing.

Thinking back, those computers seemed almost magical to me. Although I was mainly interested in playing computer games on them, I also remember learning to write code in Basic. I wrote some simple text-based programs, and I enjoyed surprising my friends with them. These programs would talk and interact with my friends and refer to them by their names.

Some of my fondest memories as a child involve playing video games on that Commodore 64. We had a sea of floppy disks with stickers on them and the game titles written out by hand. Some of my favorites included Lode Runner, Jump Man, Pipes, and Frogger.

College & Law School

I have an undergraduate degree in liberal arts from Boston University where I majored in philosophy with a focus on the modern analytic tradition. One of the reasons I chose this area of focus was because of my interest in formal logic and its relationship to math, programming, and computer science. I also have a law degree from St. John’s Law School.

Learning and Teaching Computer Programming and Web Development

Over the last year or so, I’ve rekindled my early interest in computers and programming, and I’ve begun learning and working with software development. The first programming language I learned was python. I really enjoying learning it and learning the basic concepts of programming in the process. I then jumped into HTML, CSS, and Javascript, along with other front-end web development skills.

Open to Collaborations

If you’re interested in collaborating on a project or building a web site together, or if you’re also learning to code and you get stuck and want to talk things over, feel free to get in touch with me

Other Projects and Activities

If you're interested in learning about what else I've been up to, you can head over to my personal website davelong.io or my piano teaching website davelongmusic.com to learn more.