I got tired of cleaning up map files

Every map I wanted to cut meant an hour in Inkscape, deleting stray paths, splitting engrave from cut, fixing lakes that filled solid. So I wrote the tool that does it, and then kept going.

I learned about laser engraving at the Clear Creek maker space on a poorly maintained CO₂ laser. It was great, but before long I wanted my own — and now I make maps out of my garage workshop.