John CalhounInterview
Programmer, woodworker
Adapted from John Calhoun's interview on Uses This, published 24 December 2023. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
For electronics I tell people they really need to get a nice soldering station such as a Hakko and good, thin, solder.
Coding & Development
Coding games I of course lean on Xcode since as a former Apple employee I had been using it since version 1.
If I do work on other platforms I found Microsoft’s free Visual Studio to be fine.
It’s in C and is low-level enough to stay out of your way — but still manages to abstract the graphics context, windows, events.
(I tried CLion for building for Linux — it too could ingest C-Make files and worked — but once the free 30-day trial ended I decided I couldn't justify paying rent on the software).
Design
Another example: I also enjoy modeling (like plastic model kits) and so taught myself Blender and figured out 3D resin-printing well enough to have been able to create a simple model of a "space tug" (a 1970's NASA project that never got the green light from Congress, BTW).
Similarly, KiCad is an excellent open-source CAD program (I guess that is what you call them) that I use for my electronic projects.
Media
Glider, a little paper airplane game, is the one you may have heard of if you are old enough.
Other
Simple Directmedia Layer+ 1 other
When I want to write a cross-platform game I found I really enjoy the SDL framework.
I’ve only ever compiled macOS, Windows and Linux versions of games with SDL but I understand there are other platforms you can compile for as well.
I learned just enough CMake to create makefiles that will work cross platform.