What “retired” software engineers do: keep making software. A project I’ve been putting off for a long time, having been interrupted from time to time with medical issues and other projects, including learning Python, which I avoided for many years, writing in PHP, Perl, and Ruby instead. Python is the current “most popular” cross-platform programming language and has a lot of library support, so the likelihood of someone else [younger] being able to maintain this project in the future is good.
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But making progress on it now: Starting with 619 photos of pages and items from “sample books” of handwoven patterns, containing notes and actual fabric samples made by weaving guild members up to 50 years ago. The books were too fragile to allow members to peruse them, so one of our members carefully photographed each item and the books put in storage. I’ve processed the photos to enhance the contrast from the faded and yellowed pages so the writing is legible, and put the binary images into a database, organizing them in 186 separate sets, with one to eight images per sample.
I’m now writing code to display the samples and provide forms to manually digitize the information in the notes, to make them searchable. In the screenshot, left to right: Python language reference (on-line), four “sandbox” terminal windows with, clockwise from top left, shell to launch programs, database “sandbox” to test query construction, Python “sandbox” to test methods and objects in code, and code from a demo script I wrote some time ago to explore methods of displaying images from the database, from which to copy code into the full project files. Yes, there are three monitors attached to my computer. The monitor on the right is the editor screen for four of the files I’m currently working on, that interact with each other to select, retrieve, and display the data.