I've always been drawn to a particular genre of books: personal stories about craft-focused work. My favorite recent reads include James Hoffman's Best of Jimseven, Renee Redzepi's A Work in Progress, Haruki Murakami's Novelist as a Vocation, Magnus Nilsson's Fäviken, Colin Harmon's What I Know About Running Coffee Shops, and Derren Brown's Notes from a Fellow Traveller.
What fascinates me isn't always the end product, but the process of mastery. Take Derren Brown, for instance - while I'm not particularly invested in his performances, I'm captivated by his essays on stagecraft and persona-building. There's an inherent elegance in how operators approach their work.
My own entrepreneurial journey with Contraption Company was always driven by a desire to create things that I wanted to exist in the world, though I struggled with the tension between artistic vision and business realities.
This year marks a transition for me. I've decided to decouple my creative pursuits from commercial work by joining a company as an engineer, thus allowing Contraption Company to become a purely creative endeavor.
Last year, I experimented with weekly essay publishing, exploring topics like AI application archetypes, self-publishing technical books, and startup internal tools. Writing, for me, is an act of thinking—a method of refining and clarifying learning.
We're inundated with content about building corporations, but we lack substantive exploration of craft—the nuanced art of building products and experiences. This becomes increasingly critical as software continues to reshape our world, fundamentally altering our understanding of "normal" work. But, it's the media I love to consume - and what I'd like to focus on this year from Contraption Company.
Drawing inspiration from Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, I've come to believe that craft is more than just skill—it's a pathway to autonomy and a fulfilling life. As Newport articulates in his Craftsman Mindset:
The Career Craftsman believes that mastery is just the first step in crafting work you love. Once you have the leverage of a rare and valuable skill, you need to apply this leverage strategically to make your working life increasingly fulfilling. It is then — and only then — that you should expect a feeling of passion for your work to truly take hold.
In the digital economy, we're still unlearning industrial-era practices, gradually reimagining work for the internet age. My experiment for 2025 is to continue Contraption Company as a blog dedicated to exploring craft in the digital era.
My focus will be broad yet intentional: examining trends, tools, and techniques of digital product creation, while also highlighting how the internet enables new forms of craftsmanship.
If you're interested in following along, subscribe to email updates. I'll primarily be publishing essays, but may continue to explore audio, videos, tools, or open-source code along the way.
The best long term fuel source is some repeated act that energizes you in a way that then lets you become a generative person, who uses the energy to make things for others.
- Patrick OShaugnessy, found via Good Work