I work rotating shifts at a car factory. I built a 3D printing app in the hours in between.

I work rotating shifts at a car factory. I built a 3D printing app in the hours in between. 3am is early. Really early. But that's when the alarm goes off on day shift weeks and there's no negotiating with it. I'm a production worker at a car plant. Rotating shifts - two weeks of days, two weeks of nights. The nights finish at quarter past four in the morning. Some of those mornings I'd come home, walk past my printer, and find a failure that had been sitting there for hours while I was on the floor. Spaghetti. Warped corners. A layer shift that happened somewhere around hour three and just kept going. Then I'd go to Reddit or other 3D printing communities on social media to figure out what happened. And I'd find seventeen different answers, none of them quite matching my printer or my filament, half of them contradicting each other, and no way to know which one actually worked for anyone. That got old. I studied computer systems technology in college. I kept most of that on the shelf for years, then picked it back up during COVID when my wife encouraged me to take some courses on modern web and app development. After that I spent a lot of time looking for something worth building with it. Turns out the thing worth building was the tool I kept wishing existed every time I came home to a failed print. Six to eight months later, working in the gaps between shifts, FixMyPrint launched on March 30th 2026. It's a 3D printing troubleshooter built on 58,000+ confirmed community fixes and a deterministic settings engine that knows your printer, your filament, and your slicer. I rejected the pure AI approach early. I tested it, it hallucinated settings values, and I didn't trust it for something people rely on to fix real problems. So I did it the hard way. I scraped and analyzed tens of thousands of posts from 3D printing help communities to understand what people actually struggled with and which fixes actually worked when people came back to confirm them. I mapped nine slicer packages to their native field names by hand. I compiled 128 printer profiles from manufacturer specs and community knowledge. I built a data pipeline, a normalization system, and a confirmation bucket architecture that separates what people said worked from what actually got confirmed as working. The fixes are ranked by confirmed outcomes. Not upvotes. Not suggestion volume. Whether the person who had the problem came back and said it was fixed. I still work the same shifts. The app is still getting built in the same hours. There's an Android app live, iOS coming, and a list of things to build that gets longer faster than I can work through it. If you've ever come home to a failed print and spent an hour you didn't have reading Reddit threads that didn't help - that's exactly who I built this for. fixmyprint3d.com - free to try, no card required.