> Build what you Can’t Ship

This parallels another creative domain: cooking.

If you've ever wondered what's worth making yourself, it really comes down to the goal of building skills, or obtaining the unobtainable.

The latter is all over cuisine. There are lots of dishes and ingredients that are not economically viable as products. Factors like shelf-life, seasonal availability, cost of production, complexity of preparation - all that stuff is absolutely worth taking on yourself. We never see a huge portion of the world's cuisine at the supermarket for those reasons. Restaurants are better since they cook meals, but they're limited by similar economics and making money at volume & scale. The only way to go deeper is to DIY.

Just like with cooking, there is a huge range of possibilities outside economic viability that applies to any technology. Build a kit car that can't be manufactured on an assembly line. Make stuff out of wood that you'll never see at a craft fair. Build electronics and software with insane BoMs that no entrepreneur would touch with a 10-foot pole. Renovate a room in your house to taste in a way that no contractor would dare take on. If this stuff scratches an itch or enriches your life in some way, learn, explore, and go do it.