Where have I been?
After five years away, I'm back. Here's where I went, why making fell by the wayside, and what brought me back to it.
Like the zombies this site is helping me prepare for, this site has returned from the dead. But before I get into what I’m planning to do with it, I figured I should explain where I’ve been, and to do that, we need to go back a bit.
Before the site
My interest in making started long before this site did. Sometime in the early 2010s I got into electronics, learning to solder and building basic circuits, and when the original Raspberry Pi came out in 2012 I picked up a couple. The only problem was I had absolutely no idea what to do with them, so they did what most impulse purchases do, and ended up gathering dust in a drawer.
What finally got them out again was issue 40 of The MagPi in December 2015, famous for being the first magazine to give away a computer (the Pi Zero) on its cover. I didn’t actually manage to get a copy (who did?), but it’s where my interest in making really took off. Within a few months I’d built up quite the collection of Pis, using them for things like a wireless printer and ad-blocking DNS servers, and had worked my way through an Arduino Starter Kit. What I didn’t have was any real direction.
The Raspberry Pi that started it all (well, one of them)
Birth of the site
That direction came in the form of The Maker’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. In May 2016 I started this site to track my progress through all 20 of its projects, and over the rest of the year I wrote 13 posts about it, completing a grand total of four and a half.
Project 1, solar recharging, June 2016
The further I got, the more it felt like the book was heading somewhere slightly different from where I wanted to go (and a lot of the projects needed stuff I didn’t have), so in May 2017 I changed direction, opening the site up to other Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects. I’d also started wanting to learn woodworking, but after moving to Worcester that summer I had nowhere to do it - so when a letter arrived telling me I’d paid too much tax, I spent the rebate on something that would fit indoors: a Prusa i3 MK2S 3D printer.
A fleet of Benchys from the Prusa, 2017
Learning woodworking
In March 2018 I had my first review published in HackSpace magazine, which would turn out to be the first of five. Then in June, the space problem was finally solved when we moved into a house with a shed. It didn’t take long before I’d started learning woodworking through Steve Ramsey’s Weekend Woodworker course, and over the next couple of years I built the workbench and four of its six projects. Not that electronics went away completely - when we adopted Apricat that November, she inspired Wildcat, an LED matrix display.
My first woodworking project, the Weekend Woodworker workbench, August 2018 
Apricat, unimpressed with Wildcat, November 2018
2019 is when making started to spill out into the rest of my life. In February I gave a talk on achieving your goals at Worcester Source, the meetup I ran, which (although I didn’t know it at the time) planted the seed for what came next. In April a friend gave me my first commission, in June the shed evolved into a workshop, and in September a batch of jack-o’-lanterns made from reclaimed pallet wood became my first ever Etsy listing, and my first ever sale. Meanwhile, the site itself couldn’t sit still, going from Ghost to Jekyll in March, then to WordPress by July, and moving from maker.limeblast.co.uk to maker.rip along the way.
The shed evolves into a workshop, May 2019 
My first Etsy listing, with quality control, September 2019
Monumental Me
In February 2020 the commissions, the Etsy sale, and that talk about goals all came together as Monumental Me: personalised displays carved from wood, designed to help people keep their monumental goals in sight. That April I ordered an Ooznest WorkBee CNC to make them, and by January 2021 they were up on Etsy.
One of the early Monumental Me pieces, for COHO, 2020
The WorkBee also became the subject of my fifth and final HackSpace review, and in February 2021 I wrote about how I go about designing for it. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the last post on here, and my last Monumental Me commission followed in April.
Fading away
By the middle of 2021, with COVID still going on and our wedding on 17 September, everything started to feel a bit overwhelming, and I developed a deep anxiety about doing maker projects at all.
Our wedding day, 17 September 2021
Before long the site and the projects were a distant memory, and I let the site fade into obscurity as I focused on work.
The wilderness years
That’s not to say I stopped building things altogether - I just stopped building them out of wood. At work I started learning low-code tools like Make.com and Coda (now Superhuman Docs) as an alternative to reaching for Ruby on Rails every time, and used them to help optimise the way I work.
In October 2022 we moved house to Cannock, where I could finally start to settle down. I also got into fitness in a big way, losing around 20kg along the way, and completing two half-marathons. I became a run leader at Chasewater Runners, got a mountain bike to ride the singletrack trails at Cannock Chase (I’ve only broken one collarbone), and became a regular at obstacle course races like the Wolf Run and Spartan.
Muddy, but victorious, after completing the Wolf Run Trilogy (photo by Wolf Run’s photographers)
Coming back
In March 2026 I started using AI at work to help build apps, and over the next six months or so I came to recognise just how capable it is, and what it could unlock when it came to solving the hard parts of a problem.
This reminded me of a whole bunch of things I’d been wanting to do at home, like setting up Home Assistant, getting Floor796 running on the display attached to my old Raspberry Pi, and configuring screens for my TRMNL. All things I could have learnt given enough time, but which were now achievable much, much quicker, and with far less stress.
Floor796 brought back to life on my old Raspberry Pi display
And if I could pick those projects back up, there was no reason I couldn’t pick this site back up too, using it to document my return to making - albeit a different flavour of making to my prior attempts. So in October 2026 I rebuilt the site on Jekyll, and recovered the lost 2019–2021 posts from the Wayback Machine.
What’s next?
I plan on automating as much of my life as possible using Home Assistant, and I want to start hosting more of my own tools. I may even talk about my upcoming GPS-based game, Apprehension, which I’m building using Flutter for iOS and Android.
Whatever form it takes, I’ll be writing about it here, so if you fancy following along, grab the RSS feed and keep an eye out. It’s good to be back.