Modernizing Legacy Code: From 2004 VPython to Python 3.14
Taking old college physics simulations written twenty years ago and getting them running on modern Python.
The Time Capsule
In 2004, I was a student at The Evergreen State College in a program called Modeling Motion. We wrote Python simulations of physics phenomena (springs, gravity, epidemics, particle collisions) using a library called VPython. I was learning physics and programming simultaneously, translating equations of motion into running code for the first time.
Building Space MUD: A Text Game About Robots on a Space Station
The premise is simple: you wake up on a broken space station. You don’t remember anything. You start exploring, picking up items, talking to other units, repairing systems. And at some point it clicks: you’re not a person. You’re a robot. The whole game uses mechanical language from the start. Your health is “integrity.” You don’t sleep, you go idle. When you die, it’s an “emergency reboot.” The station doesn’t call you a crew member. It calls you a unit.