> Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)
That's me! It also generated a rather large discussion here and if you want to read how things were going up to that point, I posted a lengthy comment there:
How am I doing now? Still good, still grateful to be married to somebody who gets good health insurance through their job. Still need to update my website a bit (is that work ever really done?). Still working on the mix of building stuff and rustling up new business. Please feel free to reach out if you have a furniture need or a furniture windmill to tilt at (email in profile). I do sculptural light pieces too.
I need you to understand that I think about this comment all of the time. Every time someone asks for something ridiculous, I think "I could be making furniture out of wood".
I am continually surprised by how much that comment resonates with other programmers. I'm glad it brings you some joy and provides the idea of a different path should you decide to make a career change.
Since HN has a lot of Bay Area folks, I feel that I should mention that The Krenov School[0] is but a short drive up the coast from you lot. I haven't been, but the student work I see from there on Instagram is a source of inspiration to me.
You're not remotely alone in that; this thread is full of people thinking the same. Save up money, buy land, build a small home, become a small scale farmer. That's a fantasy, but quite realizable. OK, first the kids have to grow up and leave the house if you have kids -- if you're not going to have a large income, then you'd best not have large responsibilities. Maybe you can supplement with consulting. Or maybe you'd take a job for a few years then semi-retire again.
I haven't seen your comment before, but I've literally considered this exact thing a few times over the last several years. I built a few pieces (a table, a bench, a fireplace mantle) and found it was super rewarding in the same ways that building software is, but despite being physically harder was ultimately a stress reducing activity. I've got a handful of young kids and a mortgage so it's stayed in the back of my mind.
If you don't mind, can you share a little about what the pay really is like? And how do you go about finding gigs? What are typical gigs like? i.e. do you build stuff and then try to find buyers, or do you find the buyer first and do heavy customizations? Do you use your own plans/designs or do you use others? How high was your skill level when you went full time? What would you recommend for someone who is largely self-taught and therefore has blind spots with some things?
Oh I think will reach out about purchasing some furniture actually! I've had an idea in mind I'm hoping you'll be able to help with. It's a combo dresser / RSS client that could hold not only all my clothes but also any recent updates to my subscriptions
You are an inspiration - the chandelier on your website is a thing of joy. I may reach out soon, my wife and I have been talking about a side table that she has very definite ideas about.
(I'm working my way through the Anarchist Design book and thinking about getting started on the stick chairs).
Thanks for the kind words; I had so much fun building that chandelier! Please do reach out; it's always a lot of fun working with people who have a strong vision and working with them to figure out how to realize it in wood.
Regarding stick chairs, I put one together from an accumulation of scrap pieces recently (hey, this could be a leg some day! throws it in the stick chair pile). Putting one together out of random pieces and letting the pieces you have "inform" the design is about as close as it gets to the sheer hackery joy of banging together some wild one-liner (if I use awk this way and pipe it to sort it'll do what I want) in the shell and hitting enter.
It's like, there's no way this could possibly work, and then you're sitting in it marveling at the fact that it only wobbles a bit. And then you level the feet (or fix your quoting), and damn if it doesn't do just what you want it to!
It's also a cool opportunity to make some of your own tools. Jennie Alexander has a great article on making your own tapered reamer[0] (which does sort of require a lathe), and Tim Manney has one on using your reamer to make a tapered tenon cutter[1].
[0] https://www.greenwoodworking.org/steel-saw-tapered-reamer-pl... Dunno what's up with the certificate error, but the site is legit. You don't have to get picky about the compass saw. I did this out of one I picked up at my local large home improvement store.
Out of curiosity did you go into woodworking with the intent of making a living from it? Or were you in the position where you had enough savings/passive income/whatever to keep the lights on if woodworking didn't provide a steady income?
I do it for money and am not financially independent. My partner is the primary income earner in our household, and I would expect that she will retain that position for the foreseeable future.
Our goal is definitely that my contribution to our household economy grows to a more equal role, but she works an professional job and has been at it for a while and moved up over time.
dang. Do they avoid high typing requirements, or have a workaround of some kind? I often wonder what my backup plan would be to any kind of hand injury, let alone missing fingers. I used to do a lot of carpentry but my fingers are intact.
I think they were using it as shorthand for all of the physical risks that physical fabricators have, rather than saying circular saws are the one single risk and there is no mitigation.
People might find it fun to know there is a literary term for this -- synecdoche!
> a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”)
(in this case, "circular saws" representing the whole class of dangerous power tools)
Even saw stops have bypasses, for when you need to cut a conductive material. And there are many other woodworking tools with the same amputative qualities.
Looks like the price has finally come down a bit, but it did seem to be $2000+ for something with a saw stop, but only $200+ for a regular table saw, making it out of reach of many home handypeople.
Interestingly, as I recall, nearly as many people are injured each year from power tools as are injured in vehicular collisions (in the US) and way more people drive than use power tools.
There is a solution, yes, but the problem is not solved.
I bought a saw stop literally last week -- depending on your needs, they have a "compact" table saw which is basically equivalent to the craftsman jobsite $250 one, but it's $900. That said, it's head and shoulders above the basic ones in build quality, QoL features, and many other things too, PLUS it has the sawstop system.
As a hobbyist in a small shop, I bought it as my "best saw i'll need for a very long time".
The $200 saws are pieces of garbage that anyone who pursues the hobby for more than like a few months will rapidly discover the flaws of. Best bet is middle-road to get like a dewalt for $400 or so but even that has flaws compared to the sawstop.
Just a quick note on this since I ran into the same wtf? moment a few years ago.
1) Saw Stop holds a number of patents that legally prevented anyone else from adding the same tech to their saws. Most of the patents didn’t expire until 2021, but a few are still effective until 2024. We will probably see other manufacturers add similar features in 2025 as a result.
2) SawStop built its reputation on being a premium brand in addition to being safer. So the quality of components, materials, and build is a lot higher than what you get in even a mid grade dewalt saw.
I still wouldn’t buy one at their exorbitant prices, but hopefully the “accidentally removing fingers” problem will be better solved in a few years.
Another point to show how deeply unethical the US patent system is. I wonder how many people have lost appendages because of these patents and the exorbitant pricing?
Nick Offerman has a great quote about this, it boils down to the guy deserves money for something he created and others could have, but were too cheap to make and require. It's not the patent holders fault that they can make money from caring about people's safety.
https://github.com/docker/cli/issues/267#issuecomment-695149...
> Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and there's always the opportunity to remove my finger with a table saw, but nobody asks me if I can add an RSS feed to a DBMS, so there's that :-)