I Built a Doll Elevator and Fell Back Into Engineering
“Sometimes the simplest thing you build turns out to be the most powerful.”
It started with a tangle of fishing line and a challenge issued by a five-year-old: “Can we make the doll go up and down?” What followed wasn’t just a Saturday afternoon project. It was a reminder of the joy, frustration, and deep satisfaction that first pulled me into engineering.
I hadn’t touched anything even resembling hardware in years. But I had this moment — a spool of line, a couple of pulleys, a stubborn bit of friction, and a kid who wouldn’t accept a “maybe.”
Rediscovering the Hacker’s High
We started taping things to cardboard. That failed. We moved to wood. We added guide rails. The fishing line kept binding. We didn’t have a winch, so we rigged up a spool with a stick and rubber band. I taught my daughter what a counterweight was. She taught me how to keep laughing when it doesn’t work.
Somewhere in the third iteration, I realized I hadn’t felt that flow in months — that focus where your brain locks into a problem so deeply you forget time.
Not a Jira ticket. Not a commit. Just does this string move the thing.
And when it finally worked? I felt like I was 10 again with a soldering iron and no clue what I was doing.
The Deeper Realization
The doll elevator didn’t just pull a Barbie up the wall. It pulled me back into something I’d let slip: that raw, playful part of engineering.
I’d spent years architecting systems, scaling platforms, refactoring monoliths. All good work — intellectually rewarding, stable, respected. But that spark? That feeling that got me into this? It had been dormant.
It took duct tape, gravity, and a kid’s sense of possibility to bring it back.
And that spark became a fuse.
Within weeks, I was digging through AI agent frameworks, building knowledge graphs, wiring together crawlers, spinning up Docker orchestration — not because I had to, but because I wanted to see what I could make again.
Threadline, OTTO, agents, scrapers, timelines — all of it started here. A Barbie elevator.
What You Build Doesn’t Matter — Until It Does
I used to think projects had to be “serious” to be worth doing. That’s how you fall into stagnation. In reality, building anything — especially if it’s dumb, physical, chaotic — is what keeps you sharp.
That first week back into hacker mode, I opened up my old blog. The last post? A Markov chains experiment from 2014. I laughed. Ten years ago, I was building weird stuff just for fun. Why did I stop?
No more.
Want to Get Unstuck?
Here’s what I recommend:
- Say yes to a dumb idea. Bonus points if a kid suggests it.
- Touch something physical — wire, paper, wood, cardboard.
- Don’t Google. Don’t plan. Build, fail, rebuild.
- Watch for when the frustration turns into flow.
- Follow that thread. See where it leads.
A Final Note
If you’re burned out, stuck, numb to the work you used to love: build something that makes no sense. Something broken. Something joyful.
My daughter and I still use the elevator. We’ve upgraded it three times. She doesn’t know it restarted a whole era of my work.
But I do.
And now so do you.
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