I do software development work in the federated access management space wearing two related hats. The first hat I wear is Technical Architect of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research. In that role I'm responsible for, amongst other things, the software that builds and publishes the federation's SAML metadata. Although this software is a bit UK-federation-specific to make it worth making it available from a public repository just yet, I'm quite happy to talk it through with other people in the same situation elsewhere and see if we can't peel off parts that might be re-usable elsewhere; contact me if you'd like to talk about this.
I'm also a committer with the Shibboleth open source project, concentrating on the Metadata Aggregator component. This is a software framework that is (not coincidentally) designed to help address many of the problems I work on for the UK federation, and the more generally useful parts of my UK federation development work will eventually end up in the MDA codebase. I'd highly recommend anyone finding themselves manipulating SAML metadata in bulk for any reason take a look at the Shibboleth MDA. Both the documentation and the Subversion repository are publicly available.
A lot of the older software I've written runs on platforms that have become essentially extinct. I keep remnants of some of them here in case anyone is still interested.
The early virtual world of There was intended to be a controlled, designed environment for non-technical users to "hang out". The company behind the product employed an art department to put together largely static "scenes" (Inca temples, desert racetracks, spooky bone-strewn moonlit skateboard parks) that people were expected to congregate around.
What was interesting about There was the extent to which people didn't settle for the constructed environment (beautifully designed and implemented though it was) and instead struggled to find ways to express themselves despite the constraints. I ran a blog chronicling some of this, and contributed to the anarchy in a small way with some add-on software.
Of course, There didn't have much in the way of supported interfaces for extension; that was one of the things that distinguished the later Second Life and I think contributed to There's decline in the end. It turned out, though, that the PC client had a debug mode that allowed another application to make some interesting things happen. I wrote some little Java applications to:
Back before people who bought flight simulator software were assumed to be proto-terrorists, I spent a chunk of my leisure time flying virtual aircraft. This is a surprisingly restful activity, if you don't count the part where you have to land against a crosswind.
A lot of this was done in the context of a virtual airline called ACE, which went so far as to promote fuel efficiency by "charging" you for fuel consumed during flights. Of course, my reaction as a programmer was to construct an economy gauge for Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 which was capable of displaying gallons per (nautical) mile and other useful metrics while in flight. This looked very stylish on the dashboard of my virtual DC-3, I can tell you.
In an (ultimately fruitless) attempt to organise myself, I've bought a number of personal digital assistants (PDAs) over the years. In particular, I owned a number of Psion units, from the early and decidedly clunky Psion Organizer II to the Psion 5. All of these were user-programmable using a proprietary language called OPL, and I wrote a number of applications with this.
One such application which a fair number of people ended up using was my ZVR compressed text file reader for the Psion 3a. Nowadays I suppose we'd call this a very basic e-book reader application.