The Inside Story of MakerBot and the 3D Printing Revolution That Wasn't

3D printing is very much like coding, promising a revolution for those with the mindset to work with it. My wife, a coder by profession, is extremely active in the 3D printing community, and her ability to research and stick to problems is why she is successful at it. This is not an accessible hobby, as is evidenced by so many of my friends who own 3D printers that started gathering dust the moment they learned it's not simply plug-and-play. You have to figure out your infill settings, watch your inclines, your print-speeds at various points in your prints, know what temperatures work well with what materials, know how to replace the parts that go bad every few hundred hours of printing, etc, etc, etc. It doesn't help that you will sometimes be hours into a print before you realize you screwed something up.

The 3D printing community, like Stackoverflow and coding communities, are very supportive and incredibly welcoming to beginners, but the skills we use in coding, the ability to research, experiment, and stick through extremely frustrating problems, are skills most people don't ever really learn. Our public education system is actively trying to address this with the much-misunderstood Common Core standards, but until such a mindset becomes more prevalent in our culture, things like coding and 3D printing will only continue to grow slowly in popularity.

In the meantime, nerds should see 3D printing as a still-uncharted territory for innovation and opportunity.

I was never able to get on board the 3D printing hype train for one very simple reason: who wants more plastic doodads cluttering up their life? I could never imagine anything I would actually want to own or use which could feasibly be created with a 3D printer.