Northwest Waxworks started as a pretty simple idea: use digital fabrication to turn mountain terrain into candles people would actually want.

It got complicated quickly.

What looked at first like a geometry problem turned out to be a stack of interlocked problems: terrain data, CAD, notebook tooling, mold design, wax behavior, text legibility, process repeatability, branding, market fit, and then, once all that was already plenty, a whole notebook-runtime migration from Jupyter to marimo.

This series is my attempt to reconstruct the actual shape of the project from the evidence that survived: git history, running notes, pour logs, mold logs, business docs, and assorted artifacts scattered across too many folders.

The short version is this:

• I built software because the object was too specific to tune manually.
• I learned that mold and wax process problems were at least as hard as the code.
• I tried to turn the whole thing into something legible enough to sell.
• The first market contact gave me a pretty clear “not like that.”
• Then I came back around with jar candles, a narrower product idea, and a second-generation marimo-based toolchain.

If the goal is a neat founder myth, this is not that.

If the goal is to see how a real project changes shape when geometry, materials, and market reality all start arguing with each other at once, heck yea, that is this series.

What this series covers

• why software belonged in a candle project at all
• how I got from real mountains to usable geometry
• why aluminum molds were not the answer I hoped they were
• how wax, scent, color, and cooling turned into their own engineering discipline
• what it took to make the workflow repeatable enough to keep iterating
• how the brand and market story diverged from the internal technical story
• what changed when I came back to the project with jar candles and a marimo-first stack