Almost 2 decades ago in the early days of the web, setting up a site like this took considerable effort and resources. Ultimately the like of Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal were used as platforms for self hosted sites like this. Some of you might remember me from the fxstein.com days. One of millions of Joomla site that sprung up all over the globe. I have long abandoned that site and for the next iteration I am not going to migrate any of the old content.

Today cloud technologies and opensource are allowing me to run this website without a server, without a hosting company, without a dedicated or even shared server. Dont even need to touch html or css (we shall see how long that will last). Written in markdown, hosted as an opensource project on Github through Github pages, this site took minutes to setup and launch - custom domain and all.

Anyway, I needed a quick and simple way to publish short simple snippets of work, learnings, experiences without the heavyweight technology of the past. To be honest its a bit of an experiement for myself just how far I can push this setup in the months and possibly years to come.

Over the past several months - during the great lockdown of COVID 2020 - I had the opportunity to dive much deeper into some technologies and got to experience new things, that otherwise I would not have had a chance to spend much time on.

While I got into 3D printing in the past few years, it took 2020 for me to built and learn a lot more in a very compressed time. I now run multiple 3D printers from Crealty to Modix3D, had to learn Fusion 360 and Cura and have worked with talented individuals to evolve some of their tool and extensions to enable much more advanced design to printing workflows.

Software meets the physical world. The world is becoming a software defined place. Designs can be developed often within minutes and materialized over a few hours through various forms of aditive manufacturing.

This is my personal journey through this new world. Hope you get to join me for the ride…