Overview of Background, Education, and Work Experience

I grew up on Long Island in New York, and I’ve lived most of my life in the northeastern United States. I’m currently in my 40s, and I’ve had a wide range of work and educational experiences.

I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Boston University and a J.D. from St. John’s Law School. Before law school, I studied piano and jazz saxophone and worked in the legal department of a technology consulting company. After graduating from law school, I practiced law for a few years before deciding to pursue other interests. After seriously studying the piano with a renowned classical piano teacher, I started a piano teaching business: davelongmusic.com.

Most recently, I’ve been learning software development and working on starting a new business as a freelance web developer: davelongwebstudio.com.

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. When I was in Law School, I was a member of the Law Review Journal and I graduated with Dean’s List honors. After practicing law for a few years, I decided to switch gears and get back to my passion for music.

Piano Teaching Business

After seriously studying the piano for a number of years, I started a business teaching piano lessons online and in person. While running this business, I gained experience with making web sites, SEO, and online marketing and advertising. This process then led to my interest in web development and building web sites.

Learning Computer Programming and Web Development

Over the last two years, 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. To learn these skills, I completed a few online courses, read books, worked on projects, and went through a number of tutorial videos.

Lean Web Club and Front-End Coaching with Chris Ferdinandi

Most recently, I’ve been working with through materials on Chris Ferdinandi’s leanwebclub.com. Chris has also been coaching me on some different projects I’ve been working on with a focus on front-end web development. So far, we’ve worked on things like html, css, javascript, hugo, and utilizing cloudflare workers.

Back-End Learning: Boot.dev Courses and Projects

I’ve also started working through the materials on boot.dev. This program offers educational materials on back-end development. So far, I’ve worked on courses covering data structures & algorithms, python, shells & terminals, javascript, git, http and networking, and go. I’ve also worked on some interesting projects. Some of these are available as github repositories and linked on my projects page. I will be updating these and adding more as I have time.

Open to Collaborations

If you’re interested in collaborating on a project or building a web site together, or if you’re a developer or learning to code, feel free to get in touch with me. I’m open to projects, job opportunities, and networking.

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, my piano teaching website davelongmusic.com, or my website services site davelongwebstudio.com to learn more.