At this point, I'm just a hobbyist.

One of my hobbies is Model Rocketry. I got back into it a year ago after a 50 year hiatus. I also used to program for fun in Visual Basic and later in VB.net. I learned HTML and SQL2000 to help land a job in software testing. It was a bad time to try to get into the industry. The dotcom bubble had just burst and there were 1000's of highly qualified individuals looking for work. I did a 2 month internship as a software tester and landed a paying gig at Ortax in tech support. They had just switched from a DOS based program to Windows and everything was broken. I dealt with very angry people 15 hours a day for 2 months. A lot of people were not getting their tax refunds. After that, I went back to being a heavy equipment mechanic.

I use Openrocket for designing my flying model rockets. It calculates the Center of mass and Center of Pressure for you and gives you a nifty 3D model. I have done the equations by hand for fun but they are lengthy and it's easy to make mistakes. Openrocket also gives you the ability to run flight simulations with different engines.

I was talking to a friend in an online group about the need for a personal engine inventory program. There are hundreds of different engines, from Estes black powder to Reloadable Motor Systems. Your choice of engine will determine altitude.

Openrocket is written in Java. I would like to take it apart and see how it works. I want to use blocks of it's code in the inventory program. My friend uses Python and wants to build a mobile app. I'd like to learn Java and join the 21st Century. In other words, switch from being a programmer to what they now call a "developer".