Today was my first day of not reporting to work at my former employer. I'm now a full-time self-funded open-source developer (that is to say, a retiree). This post is possibly the first of a series chronicling my adventures in retirement.
Many friends and colleagues have asked me, “so, what are your plans?”
I can't say that I have firm plans for anything at this point. The year 2020 has been a striking example of, “do you want to make the Almighty laugh? Tell Him your plans." My immediate plan is to try to rest up and decompress a little bit.
Frankly, I've never in my life been so without structure. I've pretty much never had a vacation longer than a week or two without an externally-imposed schedule. Even as a child, I had my parents filling, and overfilling, my “free&rdquo time with “enrichment activities”. Mary Ann and I would up doing a lot of the same with our daughter - although trying to keep her on a looser leash than the one I had - which tended to fill our time as well as hers. “Where do I go from here?” is going to taks some soul-searching. Still, I can drop some random thoughts.
I'd really like to do more hiking. I'd been putting on weight the past few years with enforced inactivity. Having the doctors work repeatedly on my eyes and feet, with activity restrictions on the rehab, has been confining. I've been doing a lot more walking in town since COVID-19 hit - it's one of the few things I can do outside the house, and working up the distance again to where I'm regularly doing 10 km a day (without a pack, of course, or with a very light day pack.) Catherine and I have also made a few trips again into the Catskills, most of which I've yet to write about. (Slovenly of me!)
In fact, if COVID-19 is ever not a blocker for crossing county and state lines, resupplying, or sharing a campsite, I'd like to try another big hike. My thru-hike of the Northville-Placid Trail turned into a series of sections, because of illnesses and injuries. Unlike a traditional 'thru hiker,' I couldn't just rest a few days after a problem and pick it up again - I'd need to go back to work! I've kind of an itch to do the Long Path of New York - the idea of hiking from Manhattan to the Adirondacks just intrigues me. (Yes, I know, the trail is built only to Altamont. There's a description of the route beyond there: who needs a maintained trail? I'm an experienced bush-whacko.) Given the current state of the world, I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen in 2021. 2022, maybe, if all goes well.
I also have several unfinished open-source projects.
The biggest one of these, by far, is the “quadcode” system: a machine-code compiler for the Tcl programming language. Tcl is a highly dynamic language whose core paradigm is string substitution. Extracting data type information and constraining side effects to the point that safe machine code can be generated is an insanely difficult problem. Donal Fellows and I have had some limited success, but making the beast into something that's serviceable, that's deployable, and that covers much more of the language is going to be a long slog.
The next phase here will likely involve some major refactoring, and will require some really intense brain work - something that's not compatible with my goal of getting some rest after my final sprint on the job. It'll likely be a little while before I start picking up the pieces - but watch this space!
Another big unfinished project is to make a rendering pipeline for OpenStreetMap that deals in a graceful way with North American highway numbering systems. Identifying named and numbered routes with pictorial symbols on the map is a big part of it. Many North American jurisdictions have three or four different numbering schemata overlaid, so the shape of the marker is important to a driver trying to follow a route. Moreover, unlike the way most of the rest of the world does it, routes are often concurrent - it's not uncommon for a road over a bridge to have three or four different highway numbers. There's one pathological example near Indianapolis that has eight! This sort of overlaying has caused rendering gaffes, and a better approach than the current one is needed.
Again, I've had some limited success making a map that handles numbered routes in more or less the way I like, but now comes the long slog to make the implementation scalable (e.g., dealing with minutely diffs on a planetary scale; managing the expiration of tiles so that the whole map need not be pre-rendered), fortify it to be robust against future change, make it fit more closely with the rendering tools used by other OpenStreetMap servers, and find a path to widespread deployment (rather than just serving to a few friends off my home machine).
I've also been neglecting my music. I might have time in retirement to take it up again, particularly if conditions in the world improve to where people can perform again. I've been doing just a little bit - including playing recorder for a televised church service this past weekend. (The offertory , starting at 31:14, has a solo by Yours Truly.)
What else? Well, I've got a long history of going off-script. I may find myself itching to contribute to open-source machine vision, or get back into making stuff (particularly electronics), or just try something entirely new.
Or the perfect consulting gig might just fall in my lap. You never know. I'll just have to see what happens. Wish me luck!
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