About

Long Family History of Electronics and Computers

For as long as I could remember, there were always computers and electronics stuff around. My father was an electronics engineer by trade and my first memory of a Personal Computer was a 386 that I played Prince of Persia on. I learned the basic commands to get around DOS and Windows was only good for Solitaire, Minesweeper and maybe Paintbrush. I do recall eventually messing around with Nibbles and Gorillas in QBasic.

It wasn’t until University that I got more serious into programming. I had tweaked around with HTML as the World Wide Web was just starting to get popular around the late 1990’s. I was playing Quake 3 Arena and HTML skillz were essential on the forums. From HTML, I expanded into PHP and the LAMP stack in general and continued on ever since.

While in University, I was exposed to C# and Visual Basic programming in the Windows environment on the .Net framework. Super handy and makes the programs you write seem more “legit” since it runs on Windows. There are still times where I’d fire up Visual Studio and make up a quick program to do certain things that I don’t want to try and do in PHP or Node.JS (*ahem like when dealing with larger Excel spreadsheets).

With the advent of affordable micro controllers like Arduino and the plethora of sensors available, I’ve been expanding into the hardware side of Computer Science. Raspberry Pi has been very interesting as well. But being a full-on Linux computer, I didn’t see it as much different that a regular computer running Linux and was drawn to the Arduino more for hardware experiments. Not that I haven’t messed with the GPIO of the Raspberry Pi, just different applications.