Maker

Making It

How I went from cubicle slave to full-time maker. By Mikey Sklar

T HIS ARTICLE SHOULD PROBABLY BE called “Making It Out of IT.” I spent the last ten years as a Unix admin in IT, and now I’m out. I climbed the ridiculous corporate ladder to the highest technical position that I could reach. I rode my bike to Wall Street each morning and back home to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, each evening. This commute provided a fleeting feeling of freedom that would end once I arrived at my cubicle. I did collect a large paycheck, but it came with strings attached, of course.

I crammed my evenings with the things that I wished I had the time to do during the day. As my interest in IT wavered, a love of electronics

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emerged and occupied my nights. I wanted to make circuit boards, program microcontrollers, and design gadgets of questionable usefulness all the time. I was no longer interested in writing high-level-language Perl scripts that monitored things I cared little about. I wanted to work in the physical world, and the IT gig was clearly not the way.

Unsure where the road away from IT led, I quit and made my first unemployed decision. My new goal: connect microcontrollers with some force from nature. I chose fire. Looking around my apartment, I realized that it was time to expand. Sure,

I could make wearables and mess with RFID implants in my apartment, but imagine what

Photography by Wendy Tremayne