Why I build¶

I spent most of my career managing the work of people who built things. Specifications, timelines, budgets, stakeholder updates. The distance between the work and the outcome was always mediated by someone else's hands.

Then I started building.

What changed¶

The PRUSA CoreOne arrived as a flat-pack kit — four hundred parts and a manual that is one of the finest pieces of technical documentation in consumer hardware: clear, illustrated, sequenced correctly, honest about where things go wrong.

I built it over several evenings. My hands understood what my specifications never quite reached: the tolerance between a part that fits and a part that doesn't, the moment a calibration print comes out right and you know the machine is ready.

This is not nostalgia for craft. It's an understanding that arrived late: people who design systems for others to build should know what building feels like.

The libdrone argument¶

I documented libdrone completely before the hardware flew. Some people find that backwards.

It isn't. When you have to write down every measurement clearly enough for a stranger to reproduce it, you're forced to understand the system completely. Ambiguity that's invisible in design becomes visible in documentation. A measurement you can't express precisely is a measurement you haven't finished thinking about.

The documentation and the build are the same process — one in prose, one with a printer and a soldering iron. Both require that you understand what you're doing.

Build before you buy¶

Everything I've built has taught me something that couldn't be purchased: how a tolerance stack behaves in a mechanical assembly (and the value of tolerance in everyday life), how a solder joint fails, what a calibration print is telling you.

Not anti-commercial — I buy components constantly. But the platform itself is built, not bought. A platform you built is a platform you can repair. A platform you can repair is infrastructure. Infrastructure you control is sovereignty.

That's the libdrone argument in three sentences. It's also why I have a 3D printer instead of an off-the-shelf drone.