Somebody in the peanut gallery asked TechJeeper what the Polaroid on the wall behind him was. It's not a Polaroid. It's a rug, and he tufted it himself.
It's also the only one he's ever made. He liked doing it. He still has all the pieces, he says he wants to do it again, and he and his wife went and backed a robotic tufting machine on Kickstarter that shows up in October. But the rug is one rug, and he was straightforward about why. "I have a million hobbies, and oftentimes I'll go head first into a hobby and I'll do it and I'll never do it again."
Once he said that, I started hearing it everywhere else in the conversation.
He built websites for his friends in high school, back in the MySpace era when you could drop your own CSS into a page and make something nobody else had. He liked it enough to start a web design company while he was in college. Then it was work. He finished his last customer project and didn't really do web design again until he started Printventory about three years ago. He did craft shows and sold prints for a while too, until he noticed he was printing for the show instead of printing because he wanted to.
And one Christmas his wife got him a Tevo Tarantula kit. He spent weeks on it, and when he finally got it together it never printed well. So he quit. Two years, nothing, and he'd already been printing for more than a decade at that point. What brought him back was a hundred-dollar Ender 3 from Micro Center. Cheap enough that trying again cost him nothing.
He does this with jobs too, and he'll tell you so without softening it. If he woke up dreading the login, he'd go find another one. He has, more than once, usually because he stopped feeling like the work meant anything.
Which brings us to the thing people actually ask him about. Printventory is free. It's a real piece of software — people turn up in his Discord asking whether it'll handle their 49 terabytes of models — and he gets messages on Reddit almost daily about somebody selling a clone of it for forty dollars a year. So why doesn't he charge?
"If I charge for it, I'm going to have an obligation to keep it around."
He does love helping people and he means it, but that's not the load-bearing part. The free part is an exit. It's open source and it's sitting on GitHub, so the day he gets bored he can walk and somebody else can pick it up. Start taking money and he'd owe people a fix, and he already has a job where he owes people things.
So he can leave anything. That's established.
Now look at what he doesn't leave.
He stayed up three days straight building MakerChip with Kevin, who is particular about every little thing, and he calls those three days fun. Last week he wrote a firmware mod for Kevin's Panda Touch so Kevin could see every printer he owns on one screen, and had to scrape together enough memory on the thing to get it to authenticate at all. Karen wanted a TV guide view on MakersOnStream, so MakersOnStream has a TV guide view. She's also the reason he finally started a Discord after holding out for years. He taught her the AI programming side of things, built her one version of a chat pond, and then told her to build the next one herself and offered to sit on a call and show her how.
His wife does fiber arts, and he was working on an app for her that would take a pattern and show you what the finished piece is going to look like. Nobody has figured that out mathematically yet, so there was nothing for the AI to have learned from and no shortcut to take. They were poking at it anyway. He also makes her something for every holiday and every event. "She always loves it. I like seeing people enjoy what I'm giving them."
And the print that meant the most to him wasn't for him either. He'd been collecting knives for a while, so this past Father's Day he bought a decent one specifically because he knew he could print new scales for the handle. His father-in-law was airborne. He put the unit insignia on it.
The man still carries it. Pulls it out, shows people, tells them his son-in-law made it.
He'll walk away from a hobby or a tool or a job the day it stops being fun. He stayed up three days for Kevin.
So what have you kept doing, and is there somebody on the other end of it?