The scanning years — and the frustration that became software

After the summer break of 2011, I picked up a laser scanner for the first time. My first job: the baggage handling system at an airport in England.

I stepped into scanning at a 3D scanning company in Enschede. The tool: a FARO laser scanner. You set it down, it spins around, and within minutes you have millions of points — an exact 3D copy of reality. For someone who had always been into technology and computers, that clicked immediately.

And it moved fast. My first assignment was that airport; three months later I was in China for my first job abroad. From store layout a few years earlier to scanning on the other side of the world.

It didn't stop at one scanner or one kind of work. In the years that followed I scanned the most varied objects — factories, buildings, installations, even boats — and became responsible for the whole scanning department: planning, execution, registration and delivery. The best part? You get to go everywhere. You see behind the scenes of companies most people never get to look inside. Every job a different world.

But there was a catch. A scan is beautiful, but a point cloud is not yet a model. To turn it into something usable, everything had to be redrawn by hand in CAD: every pipe, every profile, every floor. Hours, sometimes days per model. Accurate, but mind-numbing and error-prone.

And right there, an idea took root that never let go. There was software for it, but those were heavy, expensive suites of which you use maybe 10% in practice — and that crashed regularly on top of it. It had to be different: not a bulky suite, but lightweight, separate modules that simply run inside AutoCAD. Less prone to crashing, and many times cheaper.

That idea would, years later, become the foundation of my own software.

Next: from doing the work to managing it — and why you only see where time and money leak away once you step back.