This is Technology Bytes, episode 143 for November 30th, 2025. Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I’m talking about code, and mostly in the sense of writing.
So my background is in engineering.
I have a degree in engineering from Oregon State University, and in that world I had to learn a coding language.
It’s an old language.
FORTRAN is what we started with.
I learned some Pascal.
Those are really older languages, maybe some still used.
But I actually enjoyed that part of my education.
My degree is in nuclear engineering, so the coding was almost a side project, but something that every engineer had to go through.
But it is something that I enjoyed doing.
And even as I left college and got a job in manufacturing, and I really wasn’t on the computer side, there were still times where code entered my life, and I was able to work in an environment where coders worked with me.
And because of my background, I could read what they had written.
I could help understand and help them understand what we were trying to get to, and just help with the code, even though I didn’t know it fully.
And so it’s always been something in the code itself that has kept me interested, and that continues even today in my 60s.
When my kids were little, and they were just learning counting, and learning numbers, and learning math, and things like that, I actually wrote some code.
I wrote a little game that allowed my daughter to count jelly beans on the computer screen.
I did a math quiz game for my son, and it would time him and know which ones he got correct and which ones he got incorrect.
And you kind of choose a difficulty level, and it was just fun to do those kind of things.
They weren’t really complicated, but it was fun to write.
And then sometime, and I don’t even know when it started, but I got a little more interested in professional football, and then the people that I worked with enjoyed it.
And so I started a football pool, and it was no money because I don’t do that, but you choose the winner of every game of the week, and you would assign points to it.
So if there are 16 games in the week, you’d put 16 points on your most confident choice down to one on your least confident choice.
And so I wrote software to compile all of the entries from the people who were part of my pool.
And so then I could do all that data compilation and know who was in which place, how many games they got right, how many games they got wrong, and it would do all that work for me.
And so that really helped because when I did it manually, it would take hours sometimes.
So I really enjoyed that code.
And then as the Internet came around, I was able to put that on the Internet.
Now, you couldn’t run my software on the Internet, but you could download this week’s file.
You could run the executable on your computer that would allow you to make your picks.
And it was pretty cool.
I don’t know.
It’s like a graphical interface that let you choose radio buttons and put in the score that you wanted and make sure you only put the score in once and all those kinds of things, and then it would compile it.
I’d put the data back on the website.
And so we kind of went into that version until ESPN stole it from me.
Anyway, the whole idea there is to do code.
And then my wife got into selling a given product, and so they offered software for their sellers.
I can’t remember what.
I don’t know why the term is escaping me.
To use to help compile their customers' entries for whatever show they had did it.
It’s a home show kind of thing.
It might have been Pampered Chef.
I don’t remember exactly.
I think it might have been.
But anyway, my wife’s like, can I spend the $25 to buy this software?
And I said, give me a weekend and let’s see if I can make it for you because there was nothing special.
It didn’t phone home.
You still had to take what was on the screen and transfer it to a piece of paper.
And so there wasn’t anything super fancy about it.
And so they had sent my wife, yeah, maybe this is an admission of some kind of fraud.
I don’t know.
But they sent my wife a disk with screenshots of what the software would look like.
And so I just reverse engineered that and made it for her.
And the cool thing is that the software that they gave her was for everyone, not just for one person.
And so my wife would say it would be cool if the software could do this.
And so I would change my code to do exactly what she wanted me to.
And she was able to get to a point where she could do the paperwork that used to take her about three or four hours in about 30 minutes.
So again, code just was part of what I did when I was a younger person.
And then at some point it kind of passed me by and I still think about it a little bit.
And then here recently you have this increase of what they call vibe coding and having artificial intelligence coding systems help you to write an app or whatever it is that you’re after.
And so my son did that the other day.
And he actually codes for a living now.
Not sophisticated necessarily, but still he is in charge of the code for his company.
And so he did a vibe code project for our Super Bowl party.
And we just have a simple thing, choose the 14 categories that we have.
We have prizes that we hand out and did some random number generation.
And you could say, okay, who got this one right?
And the system already knew.
And so it was pretty neat.
And he said it took him about an hour and he really didn’t write any code.
He just kept telling the system what he wanted to write.
Well, the fact is that he has a computer with a code base on it and something that he writes his code.
So he had a starting point.
I guess I do too.
In the Mac world, I can download Xcode and start there.
And maybe I could even ask AI, how do you start a project?
Because I’m not sure.
But I’m sure I could find it online as well.
And so then it’s like, well, what’s an idea?
What’s code I want to write?
And that’s often the first challenging step is to find something that may be worthwhile.
Oftentimes, it’s just something that might be worthwhile for me and the rest of the world might not really care.
But I haven’t done it yet.
Maybe I will.
I’m not sure.
It seems like I never have time.
But really, that’s because I’m lazy and I want to watch TV or sports or something like that.
But there might be an opportunity for me to re-vibe.
Oh, that’s not the right word.
Revive my coding if I wanted to with the help of artificial intelligence.
I don’t know if I will, but I think the opportunity is there.
And we shall see in the future if I do anything with that opportunity.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have any questions or comments, you can send them to technologybytesatmaragfamily.com.
And that’s M-E-A-R-I-G family dot com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast.
And I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
