A St. Louis-based tech nonprofit is training inmates in computer programming while they're still incarcerated to give them a shot at landing jobs in the tech industry and avoid returning to prison.

I was 5 or 6 when I got my first sense of the joys of computer programming. This was in the early 1980s, when few people had a computer. One day, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the ...