Bins and Boxes

I couldn't find my stuff. I built a system. The system became three projects. Here's how that happened.

Photo by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash‍ ‍

The Best and Worst Thing About a Sabbatical

One of the most amazing parts of my sabbatical has been the sheer amount of time available to pursue, well, everything. One of the worst parts has been the sheer volume of things now inhabiting my space because of it. New hobby? Great. Buy a thing. New interest? Obviously, you need equipment for that.

This is how you end up with bins and boxes everywhere. And it became a real problem.

I Am, Apparently, Two Different People

I have always held the belief that in business we need efficient, concise, cost-effective solutions. In my personal life, I have spent a week automating a one-minute task that I perform twice a year. Cost versus value means absolutely nothing to me when the problem is interesting enough. I am fully aware of this contradiction. I lean into it.

So naturally, when faced with the problem of not knowing where anything was, I did the logical thing. I started learning FastAPI so I could build a system to accept API calls and write out an inventory to a local SQLite database.

It was neat. But "neat" wasn't going to tell me where my drill was.

The Obvious Next Step (Obviously)

I wanted to know where things were. Not just what I had, but where. So we took the most obvious path: a fully fleshed-out system to generate two-dimensional floor plans that could then be rendered in 3D, with items placed at exact locations within rooms and floors.

I built it. And the moment I watched a flat floor plan snap into a wireframe view and stack at the correct elevation with the floors above and below it, I had one of those "holy crap, this is actually working" moments that makes all the late nights worth it.

When a Personal Project Grows Up

At some point I looked at what I had and thought, this could genuinely save other people the same headaches. That thought sent me down a series of rabbit holes. I picked a cloud provider. I picked a production technology stack. I built out a CI/CD pipeline. I made decisions, and then I second-guessed them, and then I made better ones.

That is when JunkDrawer became MagpieStash. It is a real thing now, and I will do a much more technical deep-dive on it in a future post.

The Part I Loved Most

Building the CSS and JavaScript, the visual layer of the application, was genuinely my favorite part of the whole process. Outside of the floor plan moment, watching a design system come together from nothing is deeply satisfying in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not done it.

That satisfaction is what pushed me to extract the visual framework from MagpieStash and build it into its own thing: MagpieCSS. It has its own site at derekablackburn.com/magpieCss if you want to see what it looks like.

Standing on Shoulders

The further I got into building, the more I recognized something. Everything I was creating leaned on libraries, frameworks, and tools that other people had already done the hard work to produce. That is especially true now, when access to information and open tooling is almost embarrassingly good compared to where we were ten years ago.

Giving something back felt like the minimum reasonable response to that.

It also sparked an idea: a hierarchical, almost object-oriented wiki system called Magpie Nest. Think of it as a way to pass on what I learned about organizing things spatially in MagpieStash, structured so the knowledge itself behaves like the data does in the app. Parent categories, inherited attributes, relationships. I am genuinely excited about it.

Three Projects, One Missing Drill

Let me be honest with myself for a second. A grown adult with twenty years of enterprise IT experience built a cloud-hosted, spatially-aware inventory platform with 2D floor plan generation and 3D rendering because he could not find something in his garage. The inciting incident here was, at its core, a minor inconvenience.

I regret nothing.

Here is the thing about throwing cost-versus-value logic out the window and just having a blast building something: you stop optimizing for the minimum viable outcome and start chasing what is actually interesting. That is a completely different creative gear, and if you stay in it long enough, you occasionally end up with something that kinda sorta doesn't suck.

MagpieStash, MagpieCSS, and Magpie Nest are three projects that came out of not being able to find my drill. None of them were planned. All of them exist because I took the time to explore.

More to come on each.