Sprint 8, Week 2: Full Commit (Professor Dungo Is Out, Doctoral Student Is In)
A teaching goodbye, a full-ride scholarship, and what Q2 is already running.
It is April 25th, 2026.
I’m parked. Coffee’s going. Laptop’s open.
A year ago this month, the first thing went out under the name Dungo Digital. A video. Pretty rough. Screen share, dramatic music, something about CS education and a Discord nobody joined. The energy was right but the execution was, let’s say, v0.0.1.
The honest version of year one: the mission was consistent. The documentation was not. If you were here two weeks ago for the Sprint 7 change log, you already know I spent most of Q1 posting nothing while quietly doing everything. That’s still true. But something shifted at the end of March, and this post is the one where I actually say what it was.
The Diff - Then vs. Now
If you followed the Sprint 7 change log, you know the full stack: The Firm, the adjunct gig, the community, the one sentence from college that hasn’t changed.
Skipping the init log. Here’s just the diff.
“I want to help people through technology.”
That sentence is still the same. What’s changed is everything underneath it.
Professor Dungo is done. The adjunct position at Texas A&M San Antonio, the lectures, the labs, the late-night Canvas notifications, the “can I still submit this?” emails. That’s closed. Three years of teaching programming to first-gen students. More on that below.
The doctorate is real. Confirmed, funded, starting July. And three weeks ago the funding piece got locked in a way I still haven’t fully processed.
The Scholarship - Three Weeks In
Three weeks ago, I got the email.
Full-ride scholarship. SMART (Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation). Department of Defense STEM program. I first got it in 2019 as an undergrad, used it through a master’s degree, and then life happened several times over. In late April I got it again. This time for the doctorate.
If you want the full origin story, that’s a longer post I’ll get to. What I’ll say here is: this wasn’t a straight line. Failed classes, life implosions, a pandemic, a career pivot, and at least three separate moments where I was convinced it was over.
It wasn’t over. It was compiling.
Capella University. Doctorate of Information Technology. Start date: July 12, 2026. Fully funded. The return to the student seat, after three years of being the one standing at the front of the room.
That’s 84 days from today. Roughly six sprints. I’m counting.
That part hits different.
The Teaching Goodbye
I need to say this clearly because I haven’t yet, and it deserves more than a footnote.
I am done teaching.
Not forever. Not in spirit. But officially: the adjunct position, the lectures, the labs, the grading, the office hours, the syllabi, the LMS uploads, the late-night Blackboard notifications, the “Professor Dungo, can I still turn this in?” emails. That chapter is closed.
And I want to be honest about what it meant.
Teaching is one of the best and hardest things I’ve ever done. Not the content, I know the material. The hard part is caring about whether it lands. Watching a student who has never written a line of code stare at a blank IDE, wondering if you’re the person who helps them push through or the person who makes them quit. Knowing that for some of these students, first-gen, working full-time, commuting from the north side, you might be the only person who ever showed them what a tech career could look like.
I became a better technologist because of teaching. A better communicator. A better systems thinker. And every student who sat in one of my sections, even the ones who ghosted after Week 3, contributed to that.
Thank you. Seriously.
The thing about teaching is it teaches you. What I learned most clearly is that I still have more to learn. That’s why I’m going back to school.
The Last Hurrah - WeTeach_CS
But before I go back to being a student, there’s one more thing to deliver.
This summer, I’m partnering with MakeWater and WeTeach_CS (UT Austin / TACC) to deliver a 28-hour professional development workshop for 20 K-12 teachers in Region 20, San Antonio. Four days. Full curriculum. AI literacy, computational thinking, TEKS alignment. I’m helping design and deliver it.
The target: teachers who have never taught computer science. English teachers, math teachers, coaches, art teachers. The ones in schools that don’t have a CS program yet. Schools like the one I went to in Uvalde, where no one told you that writing code was even an option.
That’s the full circle.
The kid from Uvalde who didn’t have CS in high school is now the one training the teachers so that the next generation of kids don’t have to figure it out alone.
When that workshop wraps on July 2nd, the teaching arc is done. Officially. Completely. The knowledge gets passed on. The baton gets handed. And then I sit back down in the student chair and start the doctorate.
If that isn’t a series finale, I don’t know what is.
The Sprint System
If you’re new here: I run my life in two-week sprints. Fourteen-day cycles, started January 4, 2026. Every piece of content, every goal, every task maps to a sprint number and a day.
It started as a productivity experiment. Agile methodology is how I think. But it became the format for the whole thing. The sprint number is the episode number. When I write “Sprint 8, Day 14,” you know exactly where I am in the year.
That’s what makes this different from a lifestyle blog. It’s a changelog for a person, running in production.
What’s Running - Sprint 8 Out / Sprint 9 In
If you know me, you know this post probably went out a few days after April 25th. That’s fine. Here’s what Sprint 8 closed on and where Sprint 9 is already running.
Sprint 8 closed with: DevSA’s Zero to Agent — a Vercel-partnered 10-day global build initiative with Geekdom as the SA launch point. We already run dungodigital.io on Vercel. The $30 in v0 credits were a welcome start. The build window is still open. More on what comes out of it.
Sprint 9, Week 1 — the calendar is real:
Mon Apr 27 — Geeks && × Greater Gaming Society: GameDev & the Machine: Humans Still Required. A panel on how AI is hitting game developers and whether they’re actually using it. Ends with “Bot or Not?” — a game where you try to tell if a video clip was AI-generated. This is the right kind of event.
Tue Apr 8 - Taco Tuesday Open Source Builder Nights: OpenClaw Demo
Sat May 2 — Geeks && 2nd Annual AI April Showcase: Geekdom. Science fair format. You bring what you built during AI April and show it to the city. This is the Zero to Agent finish line. That’s the target.
These are just some of the events happening in one week. There is so much more. That’s what a healthy tech scene looks like.
On the horizon: There’s an idea forming around the WeTeach_CS curriculum and Zero to Agent; something that could matter to Uvalde specifically. Too early to commit to it on paper, but the thread is there. More on that as it develops.
June: VelociCode (ACM-SA). WeTeach_CS workshop starting June 29th; that one has its own section above.
Background: Doctorate prep. Full-time job. Building tech projects just for fun. Capella orientation, reading, getting ahead before July. Nothing loud. Just doing the work.
San Antonio’s tech scene is genuinely good right now. The calendar proves it.
The Commit
A year ago I posted something lame and cute and meant it.
A lot ran that didn’t get documented. A lot got documented that didn’t get posted. That’s not a failure condition. That’s just production.
I want to help people through technology. Everything else is just the current build.
git commit -m "year one - different version of the same mission"Thank you to everyone who read a post, showed up to something, sat in a lecture, or just didn’t unfollow during the quiet months.
I’m Al Dungo. From Uvalde. Based in San Antonio. Incoming doctoral student. Builder. Federal technologist.
Sprint by sprint.
(Queue is not empty. Just moving at government processing speed.)
Follow the Journey
Substack / Medium: Techs in the City - the column, the changelogs, the real entries
TikTok / Instagram: @dungodigital - short form, field notes, main character energy
YouTube / Twitch: @dungodigital - livestreams, sprint reviews, late night builds
See you in Sprint 9.