I'm 36, I'm from the tiny town of Ayden, North Carolina, and I have been fundamentally incapable of leaving electronics alone since I was 4 years old.
It started innocently enough — a Sega Genesis, then a Commodore 64 that probably should have come with a warning label for small children. By 11, I had built my first computer from raw parts, which is a sentence that makes me sound like a prodigy and actually just means I broke a lot of things first. Somewhere in there I also destroyed and rebuilt more original Xbox 360s than I can count, thanks to Microsoft's now-legendary x-clamp design flaw and its glorious offspring, the Red Ring of Death. Rest in peace to every 360 that gave its life so I could learn soldering.
That console graveyard basically decided my career for me. I went to Pitt Community College for a degree in Computer Information Technology, but if I'm honest, formal education gets maybe 10% of the credit. The other 90% came from 20-plus years of taking things apart — handheld game systems, a TI-83 that could do things it absolutely was not supposed to do, whatever I could get my hands on.
Life had other plans for a while, though. At 22, I got hit with a Rheumatoid Arthritis diagnosis, followed by a genuinely rude pile-up of Chronic Fatigue/Pain Syndrome, gastroparesis, osteoporosis, and an arthritic spine that acts about 40 years older than the rest of me. From 26 to 28, once I aged off my mom's insurance and couldn't find steady work with benefits, things got dark — detoxing off medications one by one because I couldn't afford them, getting turned away from assistance programs, the whole miserable stretch.
At 28, I landed my first real career job doing IT support for Pitt County Government. Decent gig, but staring at a phone queue all day made me feel like I was running my brain in low-power mode. At 31, I moved into the workstation support role I'm in now, and it's been a much better fit — there's something genuinely good for my mental health about actually seeing the result of my work instead of just closing tickets into the void.
That "I need to see something real come out of my effort" feeling is basically why this shop exists. I wanted a place to put my hands on something and hand you a finished product, not just a support ticket number. 3D printing found me a few years back and turned into a full-blown obsession almost immediately — the day I printed my first model, I was already daydreaming about running an actual print farm someday. Somewhere in the mix I also picked up AI, drone photography, and I'm still a dedicated gamer whenever life allows it, which these days is "not often," because —
Somewhere along the way I also managed to convince my wife, Anastasiia, who's Ukrainian, that a guy who gets emotionally invested in x-clamp screw designs was worth marrying — still not sure how I pulled that off. We just passed 2.5 years of marriage, and I don't say this lightly: I am the happiest I have ever been in my life. Together we now have a 5-month-old daughter, and between the two of them, she has quietly become the entire point of all of this. Building something real, being my own boss, having something to hand her someday that says "your dad built this" — that's the actual mission behind the store now.
One thing I've picked up along the way, the hard way: real trust is rare, so when you find someone who's earned 100% of it, hang onto them.
Where this is headed: grow the shop, keep leveling up the media/hands-on side, and eventually turn this into a full-time 3D printing farm so I can trade the 9-5 for being fully my own boss. One functioning print at a time.