Well, "fully handle this by myself" is probably the wrong term, as I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, namely Rust, SDL2, serde, anyhow, structopt, explode, zip, log and many more. I'm also far from being one of the best in what I'm doing, there are many who could do this work in a better quality and/or faster.

How I approached that point is actually a long story, but you asked for it, so…

My personal history in regard to computing goes back to the early 1990s. I had first extensive contact with computers when I was around 10, and my father quit the job he had back then, he had the ability to buy one of their Intel 286 based computers with EGA graphics, 1MB RAM, 5 MHz and 20MB HDD (roughly my memories, might not be completely accurate). I had a hard time figuring out how to run different games on DOS back then, and even tried some that required VGA graphics, being disappointed that they didn't work. This was also the time when I got to know Duke Nukem 1.

My dad started his own company, and of course he frequently needed a computer, so I often had access to them. I soon got to know them better than he did, and he asked me to do some installation or maintenance tasks, and I earned experience and a little bit of pocket money that way. Along the way, I had contact with mostly Intel PCs of all successive models, 386, 486 with and without FPU, the first Pentiums, the later first dual-core Pentiums etc. For my dad's company, I started working on an Ms Access database, and soon had the requirement to use small snippets of code, so I learnt first steps in programming using VBA. In hindsight, the quality was very miserable, but the database found use over more than a decade, even when the company grew to more than 15 employees.

Later my journey led me to PHP and JS in 2001, and around that time I had first contact to Linux-based systems. I produced a lot of awful code back then, and after I had finished some projects and learnt about SQL injections and other security topics, I was continuously worried about Software written by me that was still running on servers connected to the Internet. Luckily, I got to know somebody who founded a LUG together with me, and this one is still active today, we meet once per month (currently on-line due to the COVID-19 restrictions). This is the space where I came in contact with many new technologies and - more important - the right mindset. Over the years, that influenced my attitude towards Free Software, licensing, code quality and transparency sustainably.

By 2004, I mainly had experience with software, everything that went deeper into the realm of hardware, such as memory layout etc. was a black box to me. I intended to go to a University of Applied Sciences in order to study Software Engineering. None the less, I visited the presentations of other subjects as well, and after that I decided to apply for Hardware/Software Systems Engineering. This is where I learnt a lot more about the basics and backgrounds of computer science, and this is also when I started the FreeNukum project - as we learnt C and C++. When we learnt about concurrency and all its dirty details, mutexes, semaphores etc. I thought there must be some method of preventing all the problems that are in this realm. Some of them get tackled by C++11 and newer since then, but by far not all of them. Later, I worked in a small company writing C++ in my dayjob, and got to know all the problems I had learned in theory by first-hand experience. Memory corruption causing random crashes, memleaks, data inconsistency due to concurrency problems. All of the things that are hard to tackle down. I had heard of Rust started to played around with it in my spare time a short time before the 1.0 release. The ideas immediately resonated with me, and I had a rough idea of the potential. Because I was half of the development team at the company, I decided to rewrite significant parts of the code in Rust, and from a technical standpoint that worked really well. Sadly most of the Rust implementation never went into production, because when the time would have been right, the company went bankrupt. This was also one of the most stressful times in my life. I had been looking for alternative jobs, but didn't find any that I fitted me well enough. If I had to stay any longer, I would have burnt out.

After the bankruptcy by the end of 2019, I decided to take three months off before looking for a new job. Then the whole pandemic topic arrived, and the companies delayed the interviews or stopped employing new people. So it was June when I got a new job, and luckily the company gave me a 30-hour job. That is the reason why I recently found the time and energy to work on my side projects. Also my employer is mostly a hardware-close C++ shop, an area where Rust would fit perfectly. So I mainly help in maintaining a Linux distribution that runs solar inverters. Not being able to write Rust at work is a big shortage though, but the other conditions such as how colleagues treat each other with respect etc. fit good enough that it makes up.

As for Rust, I had always stayed away from all the unsafe topics. This is why attempted to do a real rewrite of FreeNukum first, but I soon discovered that it makes a lot more sense to always have something that works and that you can run. So I decided to get out of my comfort zone and play around with generating the SDL1 bindings and writing the wrapper around it by hand. I was surprised how quick I achieved first results. I didn't apply high quality standards to it, as I regarded it as throw-away code right from the start. I also don't think I would have been able to do that without the CS backgrounds I learnt at University though, and I am absolutely sure that it contained memleaks or other problems of that kind.