• 👋 Hi, I’m @stroggprog
• 👀 I’m interested in ... programming, space science & exploration, coffee, other stuff
• 🌱 I’m currently learning ... Rust, Go
• 💞️ I’m looking to collaborate on ... anything within my abilities or will push my boundaries further
• 📫 How to reach me ... via my website: https://philip-p-ide.uk
• 😄 Pronouns: ... that's your choice, not mine
• ⚡ Fun fact: ... As of Feb 2024, more than 57 million Raspberry Pi SoC boards have been sold (excluding RPI Pico sales)

I've been a professional programmer since the mid-1980s, working in Military, Airline, Banking, Retail, Corporate, Insurance (Health and Vehicle), Financial Trading and Game industries. Possibly other sectors I've forgotten.

I used to roast my own coffee, and got quite good at it until a Covid-19 infection put paid to that.

Nowadays I code mainly the things I need to resolve issues I have - such as the Rust code to fetch structured information back from music-player-daemon so I can display a conky applet on my screen telling me what track is currently playing etc. but instead of using the standard conky mpd queries, it resolves data about the state of the queue. Or mars-clock-2 which is a new version of my original mars clock, but this time simpler, yet supercharged and immune from breaking external library security updates.

The 'alive-ho' daemon was written so I could determine which of my 20+ computers were actually running just by invoking a simple web page.

The rtap software was an early attempt to keep time on the Moon in synch with Earth by countering relativistic effects. My dad challenged me to write it after President Biden instructed NASA to develop timezones for the Planets and the Moon. There ya go, Dad :-)

Sometimes I code for the need, sometimes for the challenge, sometimes just out of interest, 'cos why not?

I also code for OpenSimulator, writing in-world scripts for a range of tasks, such as creating networks of objects that communicate with each other even when in different regions or grids. I have created a Health/Oxygen system that sucks the oxygen out of any enabled region and monitors the oxygen levels of anyone who steps outside a safe area.

I am currently working on a system that allows NPCs to have lives that can be defined across tens or even hundreds of in-world days, allow them to be despawned when no agents are present and respawned where they would have been if they had not been despawned and perform the correct actions they are supposed to enact at that time. This is not inspired by Blue Shirt Guy, it is the next evolution of using NPCs to bring a region to life.