My journey with CNC started when I was 11. At school, we rotated through different electives, and I remember this class called "Industrial Technology" where we were randomly assigned to different stations. I ended up with the CNC mill, and for a week I used C++ to program the machine to carve my first initial onto a block of wood. I got really invested in the process. I made my L carving, and then moved onto the next rotation, a strange home economics course where we baked chocolate chip cookies and adopted bags of flour that we cared for only during class time (so like, the opposite of parenting).
Cut to 25 years later and I'm hitting a wall in my career building digital products. I love solving customer problems, tackling abstract challenges, refining systems, and optimizing user experiences, but I found myself drawn toward solutions that extended beyond the screen. Slowly I became drawn to making things that people could touch, use, and feel good about. I thought about woodworking but it felt slow, imprecise (at least in my hands), and filled with small frustrations like glue and clamping and time-consuming setup.
Then I remembered CNC. Maybe that sixth-grade experience planted a seed, or maybe it was just a thing that happened, forgotten until now. But when I started exploring ways to bridge my software skills with making physical objects, CNC stood out. It turns precision into a solvable problem. I'm drawn to the idea of isolating customizable elements as inputs and automating scalable elements via software.
I’m not just experimenting for fun. I want to create physical products that are useful, well-designed, and worth selling. This process excites me not just as a maker, but as someone who thrives on building things people want and are willing to pay for. More than a creative tool, CNC is a business challenge, and that makes it even more compelling. I'm aware of its limitations. Though some steps of design and fabrication can be automated, many cannot. I am enjoying the process of discovery and learning.
Not every path is worth walking, but when something grabs my interest like this, I know to follow it. For me, CNC bridges the structured logic of software and the satisfaction of physical creation. I'm not just crossing this bridge, I'm mapping the route. Figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and sharing what I learn along the way.
