👋 Happy Saturday! This is part one of our end-of-year recap. What follows is a look at the stories, links, and ideas that readers returned to most over the past year.
Most Saved & Revisited Links
Out of everything we shared, these lecture notes and whitepapers had the highest save and return-to-link rates:
- 110 Tips for DFMA (University of Florida Design and Manufacturing Laboratory): ~7% readership, highest return-to-link rate. Practical manufacturing heuristics on fasteners, subassemblies, fixturing, and avoiding unnecessary custom parts.
- A First-Principles Guide to Factory Layout (MIT): ~4% readership. Frames factories as statistical systems and shows how layout and loop structure control variability, throughput, and rework.
- SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Overview (Univ. of Cincinnati): ~4% readership. Structural and propulsion architecture breakdown of SpaceX’s fully reusable launch system across Starship and Super Heavy.
- A Guide to Engineering Builds: EVT-DVT-PVT (Instrumental): ~3% readership. A canonical consumer electronics program structure for hardware development; we’re working on an expanded guide that covers aerospace, defense, and more iterative program archetypes.
- Prototyping Methods in Product Development (MIT): ~3% readership. A framework for how looks-like and works-like prototypes evolve into engineering builds that validate requirements and de-risk production.
Most Watched Videos
Digging through the year’s analytics, interest consistently skewed toward how systems actually get built rather than theory alone.
- A Garage CNC Shop Scaling to $88K in Six Months: ~5% viewership, one of the most-watched videos this year. In 2025, the owner set a $300K sales target and shifted toward harder-to-machine materials (e.g., high-carbon steels) and high-complexity prototyping fixtures after seeing stronger demand in those jobs.
- How I Brought My First Product to Market: ~4% viewership. An end-to-end walkthrough of building and shipping a hardware product with no prior context required. Our personal favorite of the year.
- The Forbidden Knowledge of Washers: ~3% viewership. A 20-minute deep-dive of washer history, types, manufacturing, and their role in real assemblies.
- Building a Mechanical Commodity in North America: ~3% viewership. A case study on what it takes to manufacture a simple grill scrubber and what that reveals about the state of U.S. manufacturing.
- Explosively Hydroforming a Steel Sphere: ~3% viewership. A short process video with minimal context; most interest came from simply learning what explosive hydroforming is.
Images That Kept Getting Shared
We also shared plenty of photos and ideas this year, but one that consistently caught attention was how quickly real factories can be deployed using sprung-tent structures—not a novel infrastructure method, but repurposed tensile buildings typically seen in athletic facilities or temporary enclosures.
What started as Tesla’s GA4 workaround during Model 3 production hell has since shown up in today’s hyperscaler data centers like Meta’s Prometheus cluster.
If we had to guess why it kept getting shared, it questioned a default assumption that serious manufacturing needs serious infrastructure. A bias toward progress with imperfect action is better than no progress at all.
We’ll continue the recap in Tuesday’s issue with a different slice of the year.
If something here sparked a thought (or if there’s work we should be tracking next year), hit reply and let us know!