The first question is: what is the project?

That sounds obvious, but it was the problem underneath a whole pile of other problems.

I was trying to make mountain-shaped candles. More specifically, I was trying to use digital fabrication to create wax sculptures derived from real terrain. That part was clear enough. What was much less clear, especially early on, was whether this was fundamentally a candle business, a fabrication experiment, a software project, an art object, or some scrappy mutant combination of all four.

By the time I wrote in my notes:

What’s The Project?

• Make candles Why software? Why software? CAM is required How to tune

I had already burned a fair amount of time learning the hard way that vague project definitions make every downstream decision more fussy.

Context

The broad project description that survived in my notes is pretty clean:

The project is to use digital fabrication to create wax sculptures.

That is accurate, but it hides some of the actual tension.

The product was supposed to be physical, giftable, maybe sellable, and tied to place. The process, on the other hand, leaned heavily on terrain data, notebook experiments, CAD/CAM workflows, and later a bunch of custom tooling. So the whole thing had a built-in identity problem:

• if the project is just candles, the software looks indulgent
• if the project is just software, the wax and market work looks like a weird detour
• if the project is a product, then every technical decision eventually has to answer to manufacturing and customer reality

Unfortunately, reality picked option three.

The early shape of the problem

The early evidence is kind of funny in hindsight. By late August 2024 there were already brand guidelines, business-card assets, info sheets, and planning docs for markets. So on one axis the project was already trying to become public-facing.

At the same time, the physical process was still messy as heck:

• shrinkage in the pours
• wick-hole problems
• leakage
• vent experiments
• mold redesigns
• weird surface defects
• uncertainty about composition, color, and scent

That is a rough place to be. You can absolutely make branding assets while the process is unstable, but it does mean the public story gets ahead of the internal certainty.

Why software belonged here

I kept having to answer that question because software projects are very good at expanding to fill the room.

The answer, as far as I can tell from the notes and repos, is this:

The product depended on geometry that was too specific to do comfortably by hand.

I needed to:

• pull terrain data from real places
• crop and scale it into useful forms
• add supporting geometry
• iterate on text, plinths, sleeves, and variants
• export things that could become molds or direct fabrication artifacts
• do it repeatedly enough that I could compare versions instead of guessing from memory

That is not impossible to do with a pile of disconnected tools, but it gets goofy fast. The whole reason the software stack kept growing was not because I wanted a cool stack for its own sake. It was because the object itself demanded tuning.

Or, said a little more plainly: if your project is a mountain candle, software is how you negotiate with the mountain.

The first big reframing

One of the clearest lines in the notes is:

Aluminum doesn’t scale, let’s try silicone molds

That sentence matters because it turns the project from a mostly technical curiosity into a real manufacturing problem.

At that point it was pretty clear the project was not just:

1. pick mountain
2. make shape
3. pour wax
4. profit, somehow

It was more like:

1. choose a product direction
2. choose a geometry workflow that can actually support iteration
3. choose a mold strategy that does not fight me every step of the way
4. figure out a wax process that behaves reliably enough to learn from
5. only then start pretending I know what the product really is

That is a much bigger project. Also, frankly, a more interesting one.

What changed

The notes in April 2025 make this even more explicit:

• existing work included paraffin process, aluminum mold process, branding ideas, and website work
• one of the tasks was simply: put together what exists

That is a classic sign that a project has outgrown the story I was telling myself about it.

Once I started asking “what is the project?” in a serious way, a few things changed:

• I stopped treating the software as self-justifying
• I started treating manufacturing choices as design choices, not implementation details
• I could see that branding and market work were not separate from the technical story; they were pressure tests on it

What this actually enabled

Defining the project more honestly did not make it easier.

What it did do was make the next steps less stupid.

Instead of asking “what notebook stack should I use?” as if that were the interesting question, I could ask:

• what geometry workflow will let me iterate on mountains quickly?
• what fabrication path scales better than aluminum molds?
• what process details do I need to log if I want the next candle to teach me anything?

That shift is what made the later tooling work worth doing.

Next

Once the project definition got a little less muddy, the next problem was straightforward, at least on paper:

I needed a path from a real mountain to usable geometry.

That turned into terrain data, TouchTerrain, CAD packaging, notebook friction, a bunch of Nix nonsense, and eventually wax-cam.

Good clean fun.