Comment by bondolo
16 days ago
I recently retired after 37 years of working in tech so of course I am working on open source.
My retirement treat was to spend three months learning OpenGL and 3D game programming by porting a classic Java RTS game, Tribal Trouble, to more modern OpenGL and Java. I learn much better working with real code and this was a great experience. It was certainly a different experience than it would have been without an LLM teacher, reviewer, helper, assistant. The app was beautifully designed and very cleanly implemented back in Java 1.4 days of 2004 so it has been a joy to modernize it while attempting to preserve the clean design. The OpenGL work and the necessary math was a lot different than what I have been doing for most of my career so it was a lot of fun. I will probably continue tinkering with Tribal Trouble occasionally as I still enjoy playing the game. I want to learn Blender to edit/improve the 3D models. (https://github.com/bondolo/tribaltrouble)
For now I have mostly moved on from gaming and am instead working on improving the accessibility (#a11y) of the Wireshark network protocol capture/analysis tool. There are a lot of blind and low vision IT folks for whom this tool is a job requirement. The current accessibility is unfortunately poor. I've submitted my first PR and am relearning the Wireshark source after last contributing 20 years ago. It's also been 15 years since the last time I did anything with Qt so that has been a refresher as well. I don't enjoy working in C++ but the goal matters so I will suffer through. (https://wireshark.org)
I plan to work on Wireshark for a couple of months at least and then look for something else to contribute to, probably also accessibility related. I have some ideas already about next apps. I'm currently tempted to build an NFC app for iOS in Swift but haven't decided yet. After having built in the last year both Kotlin Compose and TypeScript React apps, none of which I enjoyed very much, I am somewhat curious if Swift and SwiftUI will be more fun.
Excellent work on Tribal Trouble. I'm a huge Java fan and I had no idea this existed (usually you only hear about Minecraft and RuneScape). I wonder how much OpenGL/LWJGL code there is. It could maybe run in the browser with CheerpJ or TeaVM if that code could be ported to WebGL.
My labor of love is SnapCode: https://reportmill.com/SnapCode . It has a small interface (camera + vertex buffer) that can run on either desktop or in browser.
This would also be a great candidate for JDeploy (https://jdeploy.com), too, to provide a nice download package for multiple platforms.
Love this. I have to say after 20 years of working in tech, I'm keen to retire to a world of chopping wood and gardening...but who knows, i guess winter will still keep me in doors when that happens.
Congrats on making it to retirement and keeping busy, hope you have a great time!
I am 4 months into a planned 6 month break. The plan was learn Spanish and do some traveling. After a month I started a side project and haven't focused on much else.
Years of the reward cycle being around shipping code is hard to override I guess.
Oh, I am doing a lot more than just hacking code. I am also cooking, gardening, reading, writing, travelling, brewing and distilling, swimming, volunteering, …