About me: I go by many names online, including one very close to my first name, Alex (Amplex). Generally in Discord now I am known as 'crypticsilence'. I've always enjoyed computers. One of my first memories was looking up at my father working on a green screen in my living room. He was into electronics, computers and music his entire life, and I found these were most interesting to me as well. Being a very visual-spatial learner, when I was young I enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked, but wasn't always able to put them back together perfectly. 😆

I have spent my life hacking things. I was born in 1980 and enjoyed playing games and trying to write programs and small games in BASIC on my first computer, a TI-99-4a. I remember trying to write a massive GI Joe text adventure game, but I had no idea how to make a good system for it, and it felt like the code was very bad because of this. I needed a way to write functions and BASIC did not really have that, it was a step by step language using Line numbers which did not make it easy to write functional programming. I didn't know at the time I could have designed it better by planning the functions better in the low line numbers, give myself a good amount of space by skipping many line numbers, setting variables for initial conditions to create your own functions.

Later on I advanced to dialing up BBS's and started playing with creating my own, and got into modifying the C code for my favorite at the time, WWIV. I taught myself C from looking at others code, and my father got me a book on Borland C. Then the next logical step was figuring out how to write my own BBS, and figuring out how asynchronous communications worked on serial connections. I also joined some BBS group meetups from time to time, and made a couple friends here and there from it.

I then luckily got to take a college level class in my 7th grade GATE program where I got to learn Pascal, and work in the lab at my local state college. This set me off on a journey of programming that would end up being life-long. I was also in 4H at the time (a club with many hobby groups such as raising animals, forestry, presentations, and we started a computer club also). I wrote a very cool AV demo (think the demoscene from the 90s, where programmers would work VERY hard to hack code into 16kb - 64kb executables that produced amazing rendered graphics and sounds, just to show off their coding skills) for 4H computer club that won 1st prize in the state fair (in 1993-4, there were no other computer exhibits at my fair). I did not get super deep into this scene but I always wished I did. It always amazed me how these hackers could move bits and bytes around with ease to produce such amazing demos.

I thought this would bring me into game design, but when I ended up at my local college again in 1997, I found hacking was the dark art that my brain needed. Unfortunately blackhatting was extremely dangerous and some of my friends online would go missing or end up in prison eventually. So I stopped black hatting in 1998 and then spent many years working with games, music, and working various office jobs, not really tech-focused, although I still kept learning at home.

Eventually in the early 2000's I started working an IT type subcontractor job where I ran cable, learned telecom, VoIP, networking, and many other things. My passions grew here quite a bit to microelectronics and I have made many small systems such as a halloween animatronic with synchronized music and lights, an LED Christmas wreath, a very simple autonomous robot, several LED signboards based on Arduino and Pi, a garage lighting system based on PIR detectors which still is running to this day, etc. I made one instructable (remember that site?) regarding the LED Christmas wreath, but did not bother documenting many of my projects online, my documentation has always been for me more than anything.

Well, that is changing. In my middle age I've become focused on how important it is to document things for others as well, I've focused on organizational principals, using things like OneNote to create a 2nd brain which is searchable, and now I finally am feeling the need to give back to my community if I can. Life is short, hopefully some of the learning I've done on my own which has taken me my whole life can be condensed and distilled down to simple wisdom for others to advance themselves much quicker. In the days of strong AI, and learning that likely I am on the autism spectrum now, I think my journeys will be less and less relevant to others. But I figured this site will be a collection of blogs about projects I work on, and just whats going on in my tech life.