Who is Christopher's Factory?

 

Christopher, AKA Christopher's Factory is an American YouTuber, content creator, and internet personality. He was born and raised in central Texas. After living in Thailand for two years, Christopher went to Texas State University, where he received his Bachelor's of Science in Finance. Now married, Christopher still lives in Central Texas, where he continues to make videos and content relating to STEM, as well as project-based vlogs and how-to videos. He has a special affinity for electronics and homemade wind turbines. 

(Okay, I'll write in first-person from here)

Is Christopher's Factory an Engineer?

No. I went to school for finance, my first love. I've always been enthralled by the world of finance. I like to joke around that while being into stocks and crypto is fairly vogue now, when I was a teenager, it was relatively niche, and largely unheard of for someone my age. I opened my first brokerage account the day I turned 18, with a new FinTech company that boasted commission free stock and options trading. That's right -- in 2015, I was one of the first few hundred users of Robinhood. 

I discovered my love for engineering in 2020, through finance. I was working on an extracurricular project where I wanted to backtest portfolio strategies, and to do that, I wanted data going back 50 years for every company in the S&P 500. Upon finding out how tightly paywalled financial data is kept, I opted to figure out how to do such a thing myself. 

This was also when COVID was rattling up the world, so I had nowhere to go, and had gotten bored of every game in my Steam library. I chose to take Coursera's highly-rated, 5-course Python for Everybody specialization with Chuck Severance. I found out in that class just how easy it is to find clever solutions to complex problems so long as I was willing to be resourceful. I made many Python scripts that fetched data from free sources, indexed it in an SQL database, and allowed me to pull from and poll the data as needed. 

Around that same time, my sister was getting ready to leave the country for an extended mission trip. I wanted to find or make her a meaningful present to send her off with. This also coincided with me falling down a rabbit hole of chaos theory and double pendulums. It got me interested in how anyone makes anything.

Years ago, every household in the country had an at-home manufacturing setup. It consisted of the staples -- a drill, a vice, a saw, wrenches, sockets, clamps, maybe a router, at least the essentials to make average quality things. In the 90's and the 2000's, injection molding, cheap imports, and bulk production lessened the need for anyone to need more than just the absolute basics, and as a result, home manufacturing of any kind screeched to a halt. 

In the 2010s, the internet, open-sourcing, and advances in precision technology allowed for high-tech, user-friendly tools with vibrant online communities discussing and sharing tips and projects. As a result, we've seen a huge resurgence of home manufacturing, but in a different capacity. With machines like laser cutters, 3D printers, and battery-powered hand tools that actually keep up with their corded counterparts, as well as developments in embedded systems, hobbyist electronics, and CAD software, there are few project concepts that the armchair prototyper could not see to fruition. 

There is a reason we call ours the information age. For centuries, good craftsmanship technique was unpublicized, such as to not diminish the value of the artisan's work. This is no longer the case. 

Herein lies the niche that I have identified for my content. The human capacity for greatness has never been higher. The luck factor of birth circumstances has been greatly dulled. Nearly anyone can create nearly anything. The problem is that most people don't realize how easy it is to get started. Many people think, "Oh, I couldn't do XYZ, I'm not good with [computers, my hands, etc]." You don't need to be! You only need to be willing to learn.