What coding do you do outside of video games?

wow, i'm sitting here trying to think of a response, and honestly i can't think of anything that i've programmed that wasn't game related in some form.

i guess for me, all the applications i would write, are already out their, so i don't really need to make anything to improve the speed of doing some mundane task.

I'm interested in compiler construction. I hand-rolled a lexer just for fun the other night and will probably hand-roll a parser to go with it at some point when I'm not preoccupied with something else.

When not at work programming games and tools, I enjoy working on low level nitty gritty stuff like porting and driver development on UNIX operating systems.

About two years ago I finished a project where I wrote a driver for FreeBSD to communicate (via RS-232) with a high pitched gas leak detecting safety device for oil-rigs.

The device itself was pretty awesome, it was in an old bomb-casing (to withstand high heat and pressure) and had loads of cylinders sticking out for each of the sensors. Making it look like a nuclear bomb of some sort :)

EDIT: Here it is, a picture. (The big orange thing)
http://www.groveley.co.uk/Detection-Products/ultrasonic-gas-detection.aspx

i guess for me, all the applications i would write, are already out their, so i don't really need to make anything to improve the speed of doing some mundane task

I agree with this, but I must say that last time I programmed something that wasn't game related was the program that prints out all of your IP data that you can get from ipconfig.exe in windows to file. And I to took around one hour or so.

My main side-project repos live here and here.

My day job is in corporate IT, and I spend a fair bit of time coding things related to finance/statistics/analytics etc. Lots of SQL, MapReduce etc. Also, a fair chunk of coding at work is in some sense related to gluing systems together or shifting large volumes of data around.

i guess for me, all the applications i would write, are already out their, so i don't really need to make anything to improve the speed of doing some mundane task.

I actually find myself doing this from time to time. Either writing scripts to churn through some data / files to speed up a monotonous task, or writing desktop utilities for various things (organizing musical samples, managing desktop backgrounds etc).

I'm also interested in non-game simulation, and focused on scientific computation in my degree research project. I've coded toy projects in this area - like a gravitational solar system simulation which I thought would be interesting to play with.

I've written a bit of software pertaining to CNC machinery and some custom-built woodworking equipment I work with. Most programming outside of game development doesn't really interest me, but some of these projects have been fun.

I've written a bit of software pertaining to CNC machinery and some custom-built woodworking equipment I work with. Most programming outside of game development doesn't really interest me, but some of these projects have been fun.

That's actually quite awesome. But I guess I should expect that most people on this forum aren't interested in writing other types of applications too often.

I did some non game-related programming. For example a graphical CNC code (G code) editor for my first job, I have been developing a paper modeller software for a few years now (no progress on that side), small proof-of-concept demos.
Now, I'm programming an automated endurance test bench for my current job (instrument control, data acquisition and evaluation, some automatic report generation, fancy GUI) in Labview, and will get into some extra job for a CAD application (mainly the geometric/graphic stuff). I could do that in full time, but I rejected the job offer this time (maybe I'll enter the company later).

I do not develop games. However, most of my work falls in the following categories:

- theoretical and practical cryptography

- physically based ray tracing and lighting theory

- GPU-oriented development

I also occasionally did some minimal GUI design in the past.

I develop high frequency stock and derivative trading applications. Games is just a side/hobby project now. I used to make games full time but, unfortunatly the pay sucks.

I keep getting callls from recruiters and games companies but, I don't think there is anything that would convince me that it is worthwhile going back to working for a big games company ever again.

I don't do games for a living, mainly OCR and document recognition software. E.g. a company gets x-million invoices each year, we put them in their ERP system.

We do have many clients in healthcare so you do get an occasional glimpse at how they work. Once I got the chance to take a closer look at on of the hospitals automated picking and packaging systems (basically a room with robots that packages the medication for the stations and other customers).

Other game unrelated stuff I'm interested in at the moment: node.js, cryptography. And many things I have once started but never had enough time and/or motivation.

I work as a software developer for a contractor. Over the past couple of years I've worked on a document/spreadsheet/presentation software for Android, and now I'm working on the middleware of set top boxes.

All my game programming is done as a hobby when I have the time, but I gotta say that several things - like better code organization, debugging tools etc, which i currently use for personal game projects, were greatly influenced by my professional work.

I'm interested in compiler construction. I hand-rolled a lexer just for fun the other night and will probably hand-roll a parser to go with it at some point when I'm not preoccupied with something else.

Same interest here too. I've actually been able to use that knowledge in my day job too, developing a scripting language and vm for an automation application we used to use for several years.

I am an independent contractor in "whatever". I am currently developing a custom ERP and workflow management system for a small manufacturing company. I've also developed physical prototypes of devices that required real-time, embedded programming, stuff like simple synthesizers and polling devices. I have a bunch of personal projects in all kinds of spaces, from ORM to productivity and creativity inducement. I am generally of the opinion that, given enough leeway, I am capable of programming anything.

So i dont do too many games anymore. The last game I built was completely audio based, built on a microcontroller system, with an arcade joystick and buttons interface. Took a weekend. I try to stick to smaller personal projects now, because it helps my psyche to not have 100 open projects and no hope of every getting back to them.

I don't know if it counts as a tool for my game or not, but I created a tool to help writers by recording character names and letting them be tagged and filtered and searched.

GameDev.net kindly hosts it, and you can download it for free. I made it for my game's plot, but I also made it for my siblings working on non-game projects (one a manga and one a book).

I also made a tiling preview tool, more for game art - so I guess that's game related. I have designs for a Microsoft Word like application for Bible studies, but I don't currently have the time to work on it (it's a large project), so for now it's a paper design only.

Currently I'm also working on Android utility apps. In the past I have worked with Delphi a lot.

Like others, gamedev is a hobby for me, and one I increasingly don't have time for.

Professionally, I've worked on systems ranging from mainframes to embedded systems. Lots of enterprisey system stuff but also some pretty neat bits of tech along the way.

I've been learning programing for about 4 years and just a few months working on my first game. I study medicine so some of my apps are related to it. I've made a small program useful for the diagnosis of acid-base disorders, another one takes a sequence of nucleotides and gives the possible genes that can be obtained from it and their respective aminoacid sequences.

All of my projects are small, and most of them don't even have a GUI. I've worked on them for learning purposes.

I hope I can make a software for medical training with a database of questions and answers of common diseases, but first I have to finish my game (And I'm not even close to it).