A photo of me in front of the Golden Gate Bridge during a visit to San Francisco for Apache Druid Summit
I made a lot of things this year
including mistakes - I started the year out of a job having been let go from a Senior Platform Engineer Role because I’d pursued a Senior role before I was ready. I’m now in a better place with work but it’s been a challenging year and one thing that’s helped me stay grounded and keep moving forward is making.
Life for me has always been divided into time spent working on one project or another, a cardboard city encompassed much of my childhood bedroom, and as a teen I spent the summer tinkering with 3D printers and Raspberry Pis. The process of coming up with an idea for a project, building, and iterating until I have an end product that I’m (mostly) happy with never fails to hold my attention and recharge my creative batteries.
In this blog I’d like to revisit some of the projects I worked on this year and share some of what I learned from each one.
This was a super scrappy project: I’ve been running a tool library out of my garage for the past couple of years and was rapidly running out of space for donated tools so I decided to cobble something together from some grocery crates I picked up on Olio and some parts of an old fitted kitchen.
I’m still using these drawers to store things so they work but they needed a bit of tweaking with shims as the drawers initially kept falling through the runners and getting stuck - should have triple checked my measurements before taking a circular saw to my offcuts of kitchen counter!
ASCII Art Photo Booth for EMF Camp
This year for EMF camp I built an exhibit that would take your picture and print it out as ASCII art on receipt paper. This has been done lots of times before but I fancied trying my hand at it because I thought it would be a fun project.
I got this working at home but once I actually got to EMF I couldn’t figure out how to light the subjects of the photos in the environment properly to get nice ASCII images which was a shame - next time around better lightning, a backdrop, and potentially a more flexible algorithm for generating ASCII art would make for better results.
ASCII Art Workshop for EMF CAMP
Luckily what did work better at EMF was my workshop, also on ASCII art, which I delivered on the last day of the festival. Although there were some AV issues (the screen in the workshop tent broke halfway through the workshop) the practice I’d put in before hand and the resources I put together meant that almost every student was able to have their own working image-to-ASCII Python app by the end of the session and some students even built their own cool versions including with animation.
Bonus Round: Things made at EMF
Bike Hanger from Scrap Wood
This was a super quick project: I was frustrated trying to work around my bike in the garage so I quickly put two brackets together from offcuts to hang my bike on the wall and get it out of the way. Drilling holes in the brick for the hardware has hard going but I’m super happy to have my floor space back and the bike hasn’t fallen off the wall yet: 10/10.
Pallet Wood Coffee Table
My partner and I got a free sofa which we put outside on our little patio area and I decided we needed a table to go with it. I had a small pallet my partner had snagged for me on her way home (I’m a very lucky man) and I used that and a couple of old scaffolding boards to make this little coffee table. I’ve built outdoor furniture from pallet wood in the past and it went horribly because I failed to account for movement of the wood in the elements so this time I used outdoor rated hardware and glue and left gaps for the expansion of the wood.
I wish I’d been more careful putting in the final touches because whilst squaring up the top I accidentally cut into the one of the legs which was very frustrating and not easy to fix - a little more patience in those crucial last few steps would have gone a long way.
Portable ADSB Receiver
I was lucky to have a opportunity to work as a Developer Advocate this year. I built a demo which used portable ADSB receivers like the one pictured to collect data about the position of aircraft and funnel it into Apache Druid before visualizing it in Grafana.
I learned a lot building this demo and whilst I definitely have a lot of room for improvement on my public speaking and on communicating ideas in this format overall I was really happy with how this demo came out and the response it got from the community.
Signs for a Birthday Party
My partner and her sister had a joint birthday party this year styled after a mini music festival so I made some signs to fit the theme.
From a distance they really look the part although my technique for the lettering (printing a stencil and covering it with masking tape before cutting out the letters) wasn’t great and the letters needed a lot of clean up. I think next time around I’ll try looking into how to properly make big custom stencils like this to avoid paint bleed out.
Restored Expanding Table
I rescued a table that was headed for landfill for some friends that needed a larger table so they could host games of Dungeons and Dragons. It needed a lot of work as the top was falling apart and stained with paint.
I made the mistake of using the wrong kind of varnish when I resealed the top which left a finish that was sticky for weeks whilst it was drying, next time I think I’d be more careful in my selection of finish!
Antweight Combat Robot
I’m a big fan of Angus Deveson’s (of Maker’s Muse) robotics projects so thought I’d have a go at building my own Antweight robot based on the kit from Bristol Bot Builders and my own 3D printed chassis.
I made a couple of annoying mistakes like accidentally shorting out the ESC by not properly insulating the contacts on the motors and breaking off a contact on a motor while soldering which had me sending off for replacement parts. I still haven’t quite figured out how to get the handling dialed in because it’s very sensitive but otherwise I’m really happy with my robot and learned a lot in the process of putting it together.
London Transport Museum Late Poster
I made this poster at a London Transport Museum late. I really enjoyed the exhibition on poster design and it was fun messing around with block printing. Great vibes, great company, great drinks from the bar. 10/10
Raspberry Pi Digital Fireplace
On a festive whim I scavenged a Raspberry Pi from another project and set up this digital fireplace for Christmas.
I made things more difficult for myself than I needed to by using this older monitor (no HDMI meant no nice fullscreen video without a lot of wrangling) and adding in audio over BlueTooth which meant I needed to restart the speaker periodically because the Pi seemed to lose pairing after a day or so but overall I was really happy with the result - with the overhead lights off and the crackling of fire over the speakers you could almost mistake it for the real thing.
I made it though 2024
and making helped me do that. I’m grateful for the opportunities I had to make, to collaborate with others, and the people in my life who support me and lend a friendly ear when I want to talk about how I got an old receipt printer talking to a Raspberry Pi.
I’m looking forward to working on more projects in 2025.