I love this expression. Initially a hardware guy, my motivation was driven by poverty and the parts I had on hand. This quickly turned into, "what can I build with what I've got on hand?" Even after bring able to afford the optimum parts for a design, I'm still drawn to using what I've got. Most recently I found a couple HP bubble displays in a drawer as used on the original HP35/45 calculators. Beautiful things. Wired them up to an ESP32, wrote the scanning / blanking code and packaged into a WiFi voltmeter to monitor battery voltage on a motorcycle. I could've bought this on Ali for peanuts, but where's the fun in that?