First world problem: how hard it is to draw joints in CAD. It takes so much time! Often it's not that important to actually draw them out, but the perfectionist in me wants the satisfaction of seeing my design, including all the small details.

I kinda like how hard it is to render realistic lighting. Predicting the interactions between light and shadow come so naturally to us, but a computer has to brute-force its way through it for 3 minutes. I also kinda hate it, I want my render to be fast and look good!

Most woodworking software is either: - Quick and intuitive, but clunky at scale - Or powerful, but overkill for one-off builds We’re building the best of both worlds. Full story: buff.ly/X5vBX21

When learning a new topic/skill, you often have to choose between a linear approach (school or online course) which is not goal-oriented, or a chaotic approach (reading blogs, watching YouTube,...) which is inefficient in its own way. It feels like there must be a better way.

Oh boy, going down a rabbit hole to write a blog post about calculating joint geometries...

Why I started building Maqet, 3D design software for woodworkers

Building 3D UIs is hard. From design to actual implementation, you're pretty much on your own. Everything takes twice as long as you expect, because you have to think about all the little details yourself.

SketchUp gets a lot of hate from “real” CAD users. Only some of it is deserved. It shines in the early design phase. The problem comes later: repetitive edits and a messy handoff to the workshop.

“Doesn’t that exist already?” Usually the first question you get when building a new product. As is often the case, my answer for Maqet is "Yes, but..."

Over the past few years I’ve replaced almost all my furniture with pieces I designed and built myself. Now I’m building something different entirely: 3D design software for woodworkers. Why?

Nano Banana is a huge step towards replacing photorealistic renderers with genAI. A few weeks ago I tried to get a nice render from MidJourney based on this SketchUp screenshot. 1/4