My father is a chemist and retired head of R&D. When he retired a few years ago, he was managing a bunch of people and was never able to play around with chemistry himself. After retiring, he built a small lab in the basement, went back to playing around with formulas, and solved some of the biggest challenges in his industry. I'm helping him license some of the new technology he created, he's never been more excited about work.

Are you able to share any more specifics? Or at least translate them into a generic enough description of what he was able to do in the basement that it is relatable here?

What he did was very technical. His lab looks like a "mad scientist" lab, but he also built very specific machinery to apply his formula for industrial use/testing.

I guess best analogy would be a senior coder, who was promoted to a managerial position and not allowed to work on code. Upon retirement, he created a one-person app/saas company.

But a one-person app/saas company is rarely a solution to some of the biggest challenges of an industry.

Can you at least specify the field in which your father innovated?

Yet a one-person professor research team routinely solves big challenges in certain research fields?

I momentarily thought this might be a "Breaking Bad" troll...

Not trolling. Academics routinely solve huge challenges in research fields. No reason a retired engineer can't solve problems in a niche industry field.

He's in a small-enough industry where this can happen.

I read a bunch of websites daily, including Hacker News. You'd think you could get thought that pretty fast, but it takes me hours, especially if I get sucked into the comments.

I'm interested in free culture and getting more free stuff out there, so I do some stuff on Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons and Project Gutenberg.

Theoretically I could contribute to open source software, but there's no project in particular that motivates me at present.

I'm developing a distributed temporal KV store in C. My motivation for developing the TKV is my interest in such questions as 'why' data changes and the effect it has on the 'system' in general. I chose to develop the TKV so that 'time' would be handled consistently regardless of source data model.

My father's last company started to fall apart a few years ago, and he kind of let go of it and let it die. He is in the early 60s.

It was a rather gradual transition from him working hard every day and an occasional weekend, to not doing much at all.

He did some traveling, then started fixing and renovating the dacha/summer house, reading books, pestering me to explain how this or that internet or tech thing worked, and so on.

On the personal side, he became much more relaxed and less snappy/irritable.

I went from working 70+ hours at as a senior manager at a bank doing compliance to working 40 hrs a week at a university. I run a very small development team, scrum coach a larger team and get to code some days.

My kids tell me that I am no longer grumpy. I feel better about myself.

Not quite retired yet, but throttling down fast.. So, A couple of open source projects, building a primary glider and working on my surfing techniques..

From a 30s plan, or something more modern?

I've thought about this a lot, since people used to do things like stamp collecting. Today's version, despite the urge to work on something "important," might be editing Wikipedia articles. Which as Wikipedia becomes broader, is pretty important if you ask me.