ericr.org

LOAD "ERICR.ORG",8,1

Forty-odd years after typing in my first BASIC listing, I'm finally starting the blog I've been meaning to write. Here's who I am and what to expect.

2 min read

Painted illustration of a 1980s home computer and floppy drive glowing on a child's desk at night beside a stack of floppy disks.

My first programs were LOGO and BASIC on a TRS-80, in 1983. A couple of years later it was a Commodore 128 and RUN magazine, whose type-in listings were the best part of every issue. You typed a program in one line at a time, got the ?SYNTAX ERROR that meant you'd mistyped something, fixed it, and ran it again. When it finally worked, it felt like you'd built it yourself. I learned a lot from those pages, and from typing every character by hand. You can't skim a program you have to type.

That's roughly the spirit of this site.

Who's writing

I'm Eric. I've been building things with computers since the early '80s: BASIC and LOGO, then QuickBASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and assembly with MASM. I spent a stretch in the demoscene writing audio code for the Gravis Ultrasound. I installed Slackware from a stack of floppies in 1993 and have run some flavor of Linux ever since. I earned a CS degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, and I've spent the decades since designing infrastructure, writing software across a lot of languages and platforms, and solving real problems for real people.

These days I mostly write C# and .NET, with a detour into VR and Unity, and lately a lot of time figuring out how to work with AI tools instead of just around them.

What to expect here

My ~/Projects folder is a museum of scratched itches: backup engines, media pipelines, a sprinkler controller, disc rippers, and plenty of small utilities that exist because something annoyed me one time too many. Most of them have never been written up anywhere. This is where that changes.

Expect articles that are:

  • About real projects, with the design decisions, the dead ends, and the code that matters
  • Honest about trade-offs, because the why is usually more useful than the what
  • A little bit nerdy about it, since a backup tool that names its archives with stardates is my kind of fun

The site itself is a small project too. It's a static site built by a homemade C# generator from plain Markdown files, and the illustrations are painted by an AI image model running on a server in my house. The home page is a Commodore disk directory for a reason.

HELLO.BAS
10 PRINT "HELLO FROM ERICR.ORG"
20 GOTO 10

Welcome aboard. READY.