I am a perfectionist. I would rather leave a task unfinished than poorly done. My perfectionism is especially difficult for me because I’m quite bad at most of the things I try to do. I’m a middling artist, a mediocre cook, an inadequate software developer, a trite writer - the list goes on.

I am also a workaholic. I once joked to a friend that my only real hobby is pursuing several different hobbies at the same time until I find something that consumes my entire life for multiple years and causes me to abandon all of my other interests. I suspect that I’m basically trying things until I find something that is interesting enough for me to overcome my perfectionism and make a push for success despite myself. Once I commit I rely on my ability to put in hard work to overcome my lack of talent.

This potent combination of perfectionism and workaholic-isim(?) means that I leave a lot of things unfinished, unmastered, and undocumented. I tend to keep my pursuits private because my taste exceeds my ability in almost everything that I attempt. I’m embarrassed about my output in most things outside of my career. I don’t want to publish anything until the work meets the standards I set for myself.

Instead of publishing, I live with an ever increasing backlog of projects, hobbies, and activities. My backlog haunts my weekends and holidays. Why learn something new when I’ve left so many other things unmastered and undocumented in the past? Shouldn’t I commit to one or two hobbies and thoroughly document them before moving on to other pursuits?

My mindset around this topic changed about a year ago when I decided to finally share some art that I had been creating for the previous few years. I realized through the process of creating art that I was never going to be done making art and it was foolish to wait until I reached an ever shifting goal line to share my interests with others.

So, this past Memorial Day weekend I decided to declare bankruptcy on documenting my old projects and hobbies. I’m sharing a small sampling of what I’ve been doing outside of my career for the last decade with everyone via this blog post. By writing up these micro reports I’m hitting cmd + a and then delete on my entire documentation backlog and starting over from scratch.

Mechanical Engineering PhD

One of several thousand pictures that I took as part of my aborted PhD research

I entered the PhD program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the fall of 2011 and dropped out of the program in the summer of 2013 with my master’s degree. I mostly left to start a company, but I also left because I became bored with the work. Sometimes I toy with the idea of going back to graduate school and getting a PhD - but that day is not today.

Writing a book

I have written several hundred thousand words of a few books. One of them is about my experience being homeschooled from kindergarten through my senior year of high school. Another one chronicles the story of my first startup. The third is about my time working at Formlabs. All of them are poorly conceived, badly written, and utterly incomplete. I suspect they will all remain that way.

Autonomous vehicles

I used tensorflow and a raspberry pi to create a semi-autonomous car as a way to figure out what all the fuss was about around self-driving cars. It turns out there’s a lot that goes into building something that can stay inside of even a simple track for more than a single lap. This video is the only documentation that I can find of that project.

Cat robotics

I wanted to build a robot that could entertain my cat while I was at work. I stuck a laser pointer on a few servos and wrote some code to move the motors around. The ultrasonic range sensor and computer vision upgrades remained incomplete long enough that our cat passed away in the years since I started the project. Perhaps I’ll re-build something for our next cat.

Methods for 3D printing exotic materials

After leaving Formlabs I devised several different methods to 3D print a variety of materials that did not exist commercially at the time. The image above is a test of a method for creating feedstock for a two part reaction based printing process. I ultimately decided that the market for 3D printing companies was over saturated and I should just join another 3D printing company if I wanted to work in the space professionally again. I didn’t end up joining a 3D printing company.

Computer vision tool sorting system for my home office

I dusted off tensorflow to build a computer vision system inspired by the book Makers by Cory Doctorow. The system identifies an object and then lights up the accompanying panel of a peg board to tell you where the object belongs. When I moved apartments I messed up the wiring and haven’t found the interest to rebuild the whole thing again. This sweet vertical video is the best recording I have of the system working.

Software tools for generating 2D art

I built out an entire containerized workflow for generating 2D artwork so that I could work on my projects across Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. I lost interest in the stack whenI realized I was spending more time building infrastructure than making art.

Custom pen plotter

2.5 axis CNC repurposed as a plotting bot

I designed a pen plotting CNC system, built it up halfway, inherited a platform from someone at the Media Lab, used that for a few months, and ended up buying an AxiDraw so that I could stop messing with stepper motors and start focusing on drawing my creations. I’m not going to build my own platform any time soon.

Hiking

I started hiking in the summer of 2017. Ended up bagging a dozen different peaks in New Hampshire, Colorado, France, and Switzerland that year. The summer of 2018 was filled with weddings, I started a company in 2019, and last year I stayed home thanks to a large number of obvious reasons. Hope to get back in the mountains again soon, but I won’t force myself to surpass my previous accomplishments on day one.

SCUBA diving

I became SCUBA certified in 2016 and dove each summer for the next few years. I’ve been on diving trips to Honduras, Mexico, and Thailand. I decided to stop pursuing the hobby briefly after getting stung by a stingray in the summer of 2018 and haven’t made it a priority since then. It would be great to dive again in the near future.

Photography

I took an online course on photography one summer and ended up purchasing a used Sony Alpha 7 III to try to get better at the practice. I used it for a weekend and decided that I didn’t want to lug a big camera around all the time. Since then my photography has been limited to what I can snag with my iPhone. I haven’t published much of it before now, but you can take a peek at my new photography page to see more.

Cooking

I love cooking and have been steadily improving my skills in this area for the past few years. I’ve developed a couple of different recipes but have mostly stuck to cooking dishes that other chefs have developed. I took a few minutes and documented some of the recipes I’ve enjoyed on my new cooking page. Maybe I’ll update that page with new recipes someday, or maybe not.

My hope is that by sharing these unfinished projects and unperfected hobbies I will clear out that mental backlog that I’ve felt for several years and free myself to pursue whatever I want to in my limited free time going forward.

Why should I feel guilty over undocumented personal projects when I could be spending time enjoying what I’m doing for the sake of doing and not worry so much about perfectly sharing the outcome?

Life is too short to waste it worrying about a backlog.