Welcome to the Workshop
Back in the early 1990’s, I launched Fantasy Uprising a T.A.G. Bulletin Board System serving the Houston metropolitan area.
Long before social media connected the world, bulletin boards brought together programmers, gamers, hobbyists, and lifelong friends through dial-up modems, ANSI artwork, and glowing CRT monitors.
Then one night, everything came crashing down. The system failed without warning. Around one o’clock in the morning my co-sysop showed up at my apartment carrying his entire desktop computer under one arm. While he rebuilt our ANSI screens, I spent the night restoring message boards, door games, and the T.A.G source code.
We didn’t stop until the sun came up. That night taught me two lessons I’ve carried with me ever since.
Communities are worth building. And great systems are worth fixing!
The technology was exciting, the friendships turned out to be even more important. Many of those users and fellow sysops are still part of my life today.
While Fantasy Uprising was growing at night, my professional career was growing during the day. Working as a Manager of Business Technologies for an international office supply company, I found myself solving a different kind of problem:
How do you use technology to help people instead of getting in their way?
In 1995 our team built what would now be recognized as early e-commerce platform. Using Microsoft Access, Palm Pilots, and dial-up modems, customers could electronically submit office supply orders years before online shopping became commonplace. Even then, the technology itself wasn’t what fascinated me. The real challenge was using technology to make people’s lives a little easier. That question has guided every project I’ve built since.
After more than three decades in software engineering, I finally decided it was time to study the field that had fascinated me ever since those late nights listening to a modem connect.
Artificial Intelligence
When East Texas A&M University announced its inaugural Master’s program in Artificial Intelligence, I knew I wanted to be part of its very first graduating class.
Today my work focuses on Natural Language Processing, Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Agentic AI, and AI system architecture.
What interests me most is combining symbolic reasoning with modern language models to create systems that are practical, explainable, and genuinely useful.
That curiosity eventually became Forge42Engine. What started as an idea to reimagine by old bulletin board with modern AI gradually evolved into something much larger.
Retro42BBS became the bridge between where I started and where I wanted to go.
Forge42Engine grew into an autonomous AI platform combining symbolic rule systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, persistent world state, orchestrated AI agents, and fine-tuned language models to create dynamic tabletop role-playing experiences.
On the surface it looks like a game. To me, it’s a research laboratory. Every feature teaches me something new about orchestration, memory, long-term state, and human-AI collaboration. Every experiment becomes part of the next one.
Not everything I build becomes a finished product. Some ideas become open-source Python packages. Some become research papers. Some become architecture diagrams. Some become late-night experiments that never leave my desktop. Everyone of them teaches me something.
Outside of software, I don’t believe learning should ever stop.
Over the years I’ve taught myself woodworking, welding, farming, electronics, and countless other skills, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to understand how things work. Whether I’m writing software, building furniture, restoring an old computer, or designing an AI system, the process is surprisingly similar.
Observe, Learn, Build, Improve, Repeat!
People occasionally ask why I keep taking on ambitious projects. The answer has never really changed. I enjoy creating things that didn’t exist yesterday. I believe quality matters. I believe curiosity is contagious. And I believe every difficult problem is simply another opportunity to learn something new.
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this little corner of the internet, it’s this:
Keep Building
Not because every project will change the world … But because every project changes you.
Welcome to the Workshop
~Babble Baz