Showing posts with label Community College. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community College. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2026

Learn to Read Code Before Writing Code

Learn to Read Code Before You Write a Line of It. This Summer. With Me.

By Nasly Duarte

Yesterday I posted about The Skill Nobody Teaches.

I am bringing a small community together this summer to learn one thing. How to read code.

Not how to write it. Not how to build an app in thirty days. How to read it first.

That sounds backwards. It is on purpose. Let me explain, and then I want you to join us.

The problem with how you were taught

Here is what most courses do. Day one, open the editor. Type this. Run it. Look, it works.

You copied it. It ran. And you have no idea why.

You did not build anything. You transcribed. And the first time a real problem shows up messy, with no clean answer in the back of the book, you freeze. Because nobody taught you to read the thing. They only taught you to copy it.

I learned a different way, and it is the only reason I made it from accounting into AI.

How I actually learned

I am an accountant. Before I ever touched a balance sheet, I had to understand what a balance sheet was. What it is for. Why the two sides have to meet. Nobody hands you a calculator on day one and calls you an accountant.

You learn to read the thing before you are trusted to build the thing.

Code is no different. The people who last are not the ones who type fastest. The machine already won that race. The people who last are the ones who can read what is in front of them, understand it, and decide whether it is any good. That is judgment. Judgment does not get automated.

So this summer, that is what we are building. The judgment. The reading comes first, and the reading is the work.

What we are doing together

This summer, we read. That is the whole focus, and it is enough.

We will sit with real code and trace it line by line. We will study GitHub repos so you can see what good code actually looks like. We will learn to look at something and understand what it does and why, before anyone writes a word of their own.

And we are not reading a fake calculator nobody needs. We are reading SoulAccess. A real app I am building, with real users, real decisions, and real things that can break. You learn on the real thing, the way real architects study real buildings.

Building comes later. This summer, we get good at reading. Almost nobody does this part, and it is the part that makes everything after it possible.

This is for you if:

  • You are switching careers and tired of tutorials that leave you more lost than before.

  • You keep "learning to code" and still cannot read a single repo with confidence.

  • You want to understand AI tools, not just be replaced by them.

  • You learn better with a community than alone at 1am with forty open tabs.

Join, and your workbook is free

When you join the community, you get my Notion workbook. The exact one I use to map and read through what I am building before a single line gets written. It is yours free, the moment you are in.

Then this summer, you read alongside us, in public, on a real project.

The person who can only write code is replaceable. The person who can read it, question it, and know when it is wrong is the one still standing.

Come learn to be that person.

Join the community and grab your free workbook below.

Friday, May 15, 2026

Florida's First Applied AI Program Has a Responsibility to This Conversation

 

Miami Dade College launched Florida's first Associates & Bachelor of Science in Applied Artificial Intelligence.

That is not a small thing. It means MDC made a decision that AI literacy is not a luxury for a four-year university student. It is a right for the working adults, the career changers, the first-generation students who make up the MDC community.

I am one of those students.

I have spent over 20 years in operations accounting across construction, manufacturing, insurance restoration, and retail. I enrolled in the Applied AI program because I believe the people who understand both the operational side of business and the architecture of AI are the people who will determine whether this technology serves workers or replaces them.

What I am watching in this industry concerns me deeply.

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics are deploying humanoid robots in automotive manufacturing facilities trained on the labor of human workers. OpenAI published a 13-page policy paper this week proposing wealth funds and robot taxes to manage the economic fallout. Not one proposal in that paper addresses ownership of the AI training data generated by skilled physical labor.

The workers being displaced built the intelligence that is replacing them. They own none of it.

This is the defining workforce question of our time. And it is being answered right now, in real factories, without the workers at the table.

Florida's first Applied AI program sits in the middle of one of the most diverse working populations in the country. Miami is a manufacturing city. A logistics city. A garment city. A construction city. The workers in those industries are MDC's community.

The program has an opportunity to do something no other applied AI program in the country is doing. Train students not just to use AI tools but to understand and protect the labor rights of the people those tools are built on.

To Madeline Pumariega, President of Miami Dade College. To Manny Perez, Dean of Engineering Technology and Design. This series is part of a larger framework that I want to bring into that conversation formally.

To Pedro Santos and Mr. Knight at Entech. The panel discussion we shared was the beginning of this conversation. The framework has grown significantly since then and the Entech network represents exactly the kind of industry partner a pilot needs.

The capstone project for Florida's first Applied AI program should not just demonstrate what AI can build. It should demonstrate what AI must protect.

I help business owners design autonomous financial systems that work alongside their employees and strengthen the way their teams make decisions. My approach is grounded in years of seeing what happens when systems are built without people at the center.

Follow the blog at mindfuldollar.blogspot.com.

#MiamiDadeCollege #AppliedAI #LaborEquity #MiamiDynamics #ResponsibleAI #OperationsAccounting #NaslyDuarte

AI Will Love You the Day You Implement a Three-Way Match

 AI Will Love You the Day You Implement a Three-Way Match By Nasly Duarte Everyone is racing to build AI agents. Almost no one is building...