Finger-Made: Finding the Craft in a Digital Life

I’m not a woodworker.
Not really.

But I do remember the feeling of building a stool.
A shelf.
A mallet, even.

There’s a certain satisfaction when something takes shape under your hands—
something real,
solid,
useful.

My dad was a woodworker.
A carpenter.
A designer.

He built furniture, bookshelves, signage.
He even turned half a garage into an office once—
with nothing but raw lumber, vision,
and those strong, quiet hands.

I didn’t inherit his tools.
But I think I inherited his instinct.

Because I build too.
I build with words.
With keyboards.
With code.

And to me, that’s not a second-rate substitute for working with wood.
That’s a craft in its own right.

When I write, I use a tool called Neovim^[1].

It’s not for the faint of heart.
No buttons.
No fluff.
Just me and the text.

Neovim is modal.
That means I switch modes to edit, move, shape.

It feels like using different tools for different cuts—
chisel here,
plane there.

I don’t click.
I command.

It’s not “user-friendly.”
It’s craftsman-friendly.

And when I build websites, I don’t use Wix or Squarespace.
I use something called Eleventy^[2].

A static site generator.
It doesn’t do anything for me.
It lets me do everything.

I decide what appears.
How it looks.
Where it goes.
How it flows.

It’s digital.
But it’s still handmade.

Or maybe that term needs an update.

Maybe we need a new word:

Finger-made.

Because this isn’t hand-hewn in the traditional sense.
It’s not wood and metal.
It’s code and keystrokes.

But the intimacy is there.
The intentionality is there.

It’s about being close to the material.
Knowing why something looks the way it looks.
Why this word, not that one.
Why this spacing,
this rhythm,
this line of code.

And I think we’re all craving that closeness.

In a world of automation, drag-and-drop, and AI doing it for us...

What does it mean to still make things with our minds
and our fingers?

Not because it’s faster.
Not because it scales.

But because it puts us back in the process.

Finger-made things carry the fingerprints of their maker.
They’re slower.
But they’re alive.

I may not be a woodworker.
But I come from one.

And every time I craft a paragraph,
shape a line of code,
or write a page from scratch...

I remember that making something—
really making it—
is still one of the deepest ways
we tell the world
who we are.