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Hi, I’m Wendy the Magnificent
(Also answers to Wendy the Remarkable, Wendy the Unstoppable, and — on days the soldering iron wins — Wendy the Humbled.)
I make stuff. Circuits, code, half-finished projects, the occasional small fire. This is where I write about it.
The short version
I’ve got a math degree from The Evergreen State College — a school with no grades, where they write you a paragraph instead of a GPA, which tells you something about how I like to learn. Then I spent years trying to break into actuarial science. Passed the P/1 exam. Passed FM/2. Kept knocking on a door that never quite opened.
That’s a whole story, and it’s not a happy little “and then I found my calling” arc. It’s messier than that. I’ll tell it properly in its own post — how I tried to make a living out of math and it didn’t go the way the brochure promised. Short version: I’ve got a master’s in business analytics from the University of Washington now, and a lot of feelings about the gap between “being good at something” and “being let in.”
What this place is
This is a workshop notebook, not a portfolio. You’ll see first attempts and wrong turns. Right now I’m working through Ben Eater’s projects — building a clock circuit and then an actual working processor on breadboards, wire by wire. It’s slow and it’s glorious and I will absolutely show you my mistakes.
You’ll find electronics, retro computing, robots, synths, game design, coding, AI, data science, and math here. Not because I’m an expert in all of it — because I’m learning all of it, out loud, where you can watch.
A few things about the vibe
We don’t love AI here. But it exists, and we have to live alongside it, so I use it as a tool and I’m honest about when I do. Every post on this site tells you who really wrote it — me, me-with-a-robot-helping, or a draft I haven’t made mine yet. You deserve to know when you’re hearing a person versus a prediction engine. (More on where I actually stand: see the manifesto.)
Oh, and by the way — I’m a trans woman. Not the headline, just the truth. You’re here, you like it, we move on.
We’re a little punk about all this. Do it yourself. Don’t wait for permission. Don’t trust anyone who tells you the front door is the only way in.
The one rule of this website
Read the thing, then go do the thing.
That’s it. This site is not here to keep you scrolling. It’s not here to be your new feed. Every post is trying to get you off the internet and into your own hands — building, breaking, thinking with a soldering iron or a pencil instead of a screen. The goal isn’t to keep learning about the thing forever. The goal is to do the thing. Read, close the tab, go make something. If you leave this site to go build, I did my job.
Find me / feed me
🔗 github.com/professor314 — where the code lives
☕ ko-fi.com/imadestuff — if something here helped you or made you laugh, a coffee keeps me building