Studio711.com – Ben Martens

20 Year Workiversary

A little over 20 years ago, I moved out here to start my new job. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe it has been that long, but on the other hand, a LOT has changed in those 20 years.

Let’s take a quick trip back to 2006:

  • Sites like Twitter, OneDrive, and Spotify did not exist.
  • Not many people had heard of Facebook yet. It was only 2 years old and you had to have a college email address to join it.
  • Sites like Digg and Reddit were brand new. Most nerds were getting their news via slashdot.
  • The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD battle hadn’t even started yet.
  • Microsoft stock was hovering around $20 and people wondered if it would ever move again.

I started out at the most junior level of software engineer and I started in the test org. After a few years of that, I become a first level manager and eventually helped ship much of what you now see as the Data tab in Excel and the Power BI editor experience. I then moved to Azure as a dev back when it was clear Azure was becoming a thing but “cloud computer” was still very new. Satya had just made his “mobile-first, cloud-first” quote. Fast forward to today and Azure is one of a very tiny number of hyper-scalers on the planet.

It has been wild to have a front row seat for this transformation that impacts not just the tech industry but pretty much everyone on the planet. It’s exciting to play a tiny role in a product that runs 911 call centers, operates rides at your favorite amusement park, handles huge portions of global banking transactions, serves you endless information from the web, and on and on. As if the cloud computing explosion wasn’t enough, now the demand for AI growth dwarfs anything civilization has seen before.

I’m extremely thankful for this job and the opportunities it has provided!

benmartens June 18, 2026 Commentary No Comments

Olympic Peninsula Road Trip

I don’t know how this started, but our family is trying to visit every county in Washington state. With our impending move next summer, we are trying to finish off the remaining counties soon. I divided them up into two trips, the first of which was an Olympic Peninsula tour. It was about 800 miles so we chopped it up into three days and did it over Memorial Day weekend.

Before we started, I added two doses of nerd to the trip:

  1. I had GitHub Copilot create a nicely formatted HTML page with our itinerary on it and then I shared it with Tyla and Elijah so they could look at it during the trip. It had all our stops on it along with links to menus at restaurants. It also included the nice header image that you see in this post.
  2. I used GitHub Copilot to build an app that lets me generate custom podcast. First it asks me how long I want the podcast to be. Then it researches a bunch of material about the topic and generates a two-speaker script. Then it renders that script into audio using my Azure subscription. Finally, it generates a podcast XML feed and uploads it all to my webserver. That gives us custom podcasts based on specific things that we’re going to see on our trip. It’s not as good as real humans but it’s fun to learn more about specific things we’re seeing.

Saturday

On Saturday, we left early to get in line for the Edmonds to Kingston ferry. We knew it would be very busy (and it was) but we got on comfortably to our target sailing. It’s a pretty quick ride across the Sound and then we made our way west to US 101. Our first stop was Forks, WA for lunch, but since we were doing good on time, I lengthened the trip a bit by taking SR 112 which follows much closer to the water. That road was wild! It had clearly been washed out in many different places and hastily repaired. The speed limit was slow but going any faster would probably destroy your vehicle anyway.

We ended up in Forks for lunch and I was happy to see that a lot of the Twilight-themed stuff had disappeared. There was still plenty of vampire tourism going on though. We charged the car and had lunch ate at the Longhouse Cafe. It’s an authentic Native American restaurant and everything they serve comes with or on Indian frybread. Delicious!

After that we continued on to our stop at the Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center in Olympic National Park. This is where we hit my big mistake in the itinerary. Visiting a national park on Memorial Day weekend? Duh. Huge line. We waited close to two hours to get through the entrance station, but thankfully we were in the Tesla so we weren’t stopping and starting our cars every few minutes like everyone else in line. We stamped Elijah’s National Park passport book at the Visitor Center and the rangers were very impressed with our idea to put a family photo next to each stamp. We hiked a few short trails but we didn’t stay long. Olympic National Park is a tough one to visit. It’s beautiful but it’s a huge area and each entrance is very far apart. So even though we’ve been to multiple parts of it, they’ve all been for short visits where we just see glimpses of the overall park.

From there we continued our trek down to Aberdeen, WA for our first hotel stay and we had dinner at Billy’s Bar & Grill which was also a winner.

Sunday

On Sunday, our first stop was the Historic Grays River Covered Bridge. It was built in the early 1900s and you can still drive your car across it today. I’ve never seen a covered bridge before so I was glad that there was basically no one around and we could spend our time looking at it.

From there we headed to Hood River by way of Jimmy John’s for lunch. For this stretch, we hopped back on the interstate and drove through Oregon. At Hood River we stopped for a round of disc golf and then had ice cream while watching the wind surfers. Then we took the toll bridge across the Columbia back into Washington to collect a few more counties on our way to Yakima.

We had perfect weather both Saturday and Sunday which gave us great views!

Monday

Our last day of the trip was just a ~2.5 hour drive back home, but since it was the Monday of Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t want to delay our start. We shot through Snoqualmie Pass before it clogged up and we were back home before lunch.

Summary

All in all it was just under 800 miles. A silly road trip like this would have been harder to justify at $6/gallon for gas, but the whole trip only cost us $87 in electricity. We stayed both nights in Best Western Plus’s (as usual) and got some discounts there from the rewards we’ve built up. Eating out was a big slice of the total cost and we could have cut that down by packing lunches like normal, but part of the fun was the food along the way.

Now we have one more trip planned to hit the remaining counties in southeast Washington.

benmartens June 11, 2026 Family, Travel No Comments

Sheet Music Tablet

I play the piano almost every day, and I’ve been doing even more of it recently as circumstances have left me as the main piano player for our church services for a while. I built a nice cherry bookshelf for all my music about 9 years ago and I’m still enjoying that, but I’m not enjoying having to page through so many books to find the various pieces that I need to play. I do have an Excel spreadsheet with every song documented and what hymn it aligns with which helps, but I’ve always been interested in digitizing everything.

The main factor holding me back was finding a way to display the music that was not too hard on my eyes, portable, simple to use, good resolution, and had a screen size similar to a piano book. Most people who go this route choose a 13″ iPad Pro. That doesn’t interest me largely because it’s $1299 (before case and pen)… and because I don’t like the walled garden of Apple products. So I stuck with paper.

Then I found a video talking about the TCL NXTPaper 14. Some key stats:

  • 14.3″ screen
  • “E-paper” mode
  • Included case
  • Included pen
  • 10,000 mAh battery
  • Android
  • 2400×1600 resolution

It checked all the boxes for me but what about price? $339! It’s bonkers! Surely it wouldn’t actually live up to the hype, but I ordered it to find out. I’m happy to say that this device is perfect for my use case. The only minor disappointment is that the e-paper mode is basically just a digital filter applied to the screen, but looking at a screen to play instead of paper has worked out fine for me. The battery life is incredible. I don’t worry about turning it on and off all the time (which is good because it doesn’t boot quickly) and I just charge it every couple weeks.

A big advantage of having a digital screen is that I don’t have to turn pages with my hands. I purchased the PageFlip Firefly pedal which connects easily to the pedal over Bluetooth. I got this one largely because it can be powered by a USB cable but after using it for weeks and only having the battery level go down about 10%, I’m thinking that really doesn’t matter. The hardest part is getting used to having my left foot in action. It’s pretty easy at home, but I’ve found it more difficult in live performances at church because of the way my legs fit under the piano and because I’m wearing shoes so it’s harder to be sure that I have my foot in the right spot before I press the pedal.

For software I’m using Mobile Sheets. There are a lot of different ones out there but this one seemed to fit me the best from the reviews I watched. While I would probably make some small tweaks to the UX, it’s great and I’m confidently spending time building up my database of music in that tool. (Also, I learned that it stores its data in sqllite and I could use GitHub Copilot to suck my data out into any other format if needed in the future.)

The final(?) piece of the puzzle is digitizing my music. A lot of the stuff I’ve bought lately has already been digital, but I still have tons of physical books that are used every day. I started using the flatbed scanner on top of my printer and that works fine, but for some sheet music, it barely fit onto that scanner bed so I spent way too much time rescanning the pages to make sure I got them all. So I bought a Plustek Optic Slim 1680 which can scan up to 11.69″ x 17″. That gives me plenty of wiggle room to just set the page on the scanner and be confident that it will all be captured.

Once I scan the pages in, there’s a lot of work to get the pages straightened, adjust the image to hide bleed through, crop out borders, split the files into songs, combine the files into PDFs, and name the PDFs. I did that once and then realized I could probably write software to do that. GitHub Copilot to the rescue! Writing an app that generates a visual output is an interesting challenge compared to my normal work so it took me a few rounds, but eventually, I got a perfectly customized app that sucks in all my raw image scans and spits out beautiful organized music that feeds right into Mobile Sheets. A day or two after I finished that, I realized that Mobile Sheets has a lot of this built in… but… I still like having a separate app so that all of this goodness isn’t locked inside of that app.

So this is quite a journey and I still have a lot of scanning left to do, but I’ve already been through two Sundays of playing at church and it’s really nice to not be constantly swapping books while I play and have less gap in the music while I turn pages. There’s still a learning curve but I’m very happy with the change.

benmartens June 4, 2026 Gadgets, Music

Model Y – Four Year Review

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

The updates on the Tesla have certainly slowed down, but it doesn’t mean my love for that car has changed. We just crossed our four year anniversary so I’ll give an update on the stats.

The obvious first stat to talk about is the price of gas. Shortly before we got the car, I wrote an app to track the daily price of gas at the 5 stations closest to us so that I could get an accurate “what if we had bought an internal combustion engine instead” metric. I also have a detailed record of the odometer so I know the calculation is very specific: “We drove 100 miles when the cost of gas was X”. Anyway, you can see the historical cost per gallon below. The average has been hovering around $5.70 during May.

That high cost per gallon really ramps up the savings calculations. The cost of electricity has gone up a few cents since we bought the car but we’re still coming out way ahead.

We just crossed 85,000 miles on the odometer so putting all that together, we have saved $15,492 by buying electricity instead of gas. At current gas prices, we are saving about $24 per 100 miles.

Another huge win is that we have spent a total of 0 minutes in the service center. The only maintenance costs have been one set of new tires (we’ll have another set due in the next 10k), wiper blades, and wiper fluid. There was a flat tire or two as well but we get those repaired for free.

So at this point, I’m declaring that we have financially broken even on the extra cost of buying the Model Y (at nearly its peak cost) versus buying the Ford Escape that we would have gotten instead. It’s impossible to know how much service costs would have been on the Escape up to this point, but looking at historical data from our previous Escape, comparing with online averages, and noting that we’ve almost made up the entire cost gap just in gas savings, I think it’s a pretty safe statement.

It will be very interesting to see what happens after we move to Minnesota. The math completely changes: gas prices are much lower, electricity costs are a bit higher, and the cost of a Model Y has come down relative to an Escape. The exact math on that needs to wait until some point in the future when we want to replace the current car, but there’s also a factor of how much we love driving this car, having zero maintenance, and having a “full tank” every morning when we wake up.

Even talking about a trade-in is premature as I hope to keep it for much longer, but if we do trade it in for a new model, I will be excited for the newer self-driving hardware, the screen in the back for Elijah, and various other smaller upgrades. A major downside is that the newer cars don’t come free with Autopilot like ours does. It makes sense from a business point of view since Autopilot gives me a huge percentage of the benefit of the Supervised Full Self Driving $99/month subscription. It would feel like a huge loss, but not enough to justify the $99/month.

So until something changes, we’ll keep racking up the miles and enjoying the savings!

benmartens June 2, 2026 Electric Vehicles

Squished Penny Display

Elijah and Tyla love using those penny squishing machines at various places we visit. Elijah has built up quite a collection, but it mostly sits in a little binder in his drawer. I thought it would be fun to display them.

To hold the pennies, I settled on angled pieces of MDF with little pieces of acrylic dowels sticking out to hold the penny. I 3D printed a jig to help me hold the pieces correctly to get the holes at perfect 90 degree angles to the slope of each piece and also get them spaced correctly. I made three rows of vertical penny holders and three rows for horizontal ones.

Everything got put into a walnut box that was just thick enough to hold everything along with a sheet of acrylic over the front. The black penny holder part sets into a rabbet on the back of the frame and then some turn button fasteners keep the holder in place. For a finish I used David Picciuto’s homemade mix that is boiled linseed oil and shellac followed with a wax.

I learned a lot about how I would do it next time, but even accounting for those things, it’s still fun to have them displayed on his wall. The most frustrating part of this project was that it was probably a one-day project that I turned into about 4 months. I had so many excuses about being busy with other things that it just didn’t move along. So last week I told myself I was going to do SOMETHING to the project every day, even if it was only for 10 minutes. It wrapped up pretty quickly after that.

The glare is pretty intense since I just used acrylic. It’s hard to photograph and you definitely notice it when viewing the frame, but it’s not quite as bad as it seems from photos.

benmartens May 21, 2026 Woodworking

Cerro Gordo

I don’t remember exactly what rabbit trail led me there, but at some point I ended up watching a video about a guy named Brent who bought an abandoned mining town in California. What really hooked me was the price: this entire 300‑acre town and a massive network of mines cost about the same as my single house on 1/6 of an acre. Imagine how different my life would be if we traded our house for something like this!

I didn’t want to spoil the story by jumping around, so I went all the way back to the beginning of his channel and watched roughly six years of videos. It was fascinating to fast‑forward through his adventure and see how both he and the town evolved over time. The journey has some huge highs and lows, but each individual video is a window into whatever challenge or project he was tackling at the time. It’s a mix of huge projects and small challenges as well as huge highs and deep lows.

This had such an impact on me that I ended up reading his book (minor spoiler: he writes a book) and I also got a copy of the Cerro Gordo book from the Images of America series. Reading a couple books might not seem that wild, but there’s more. We had already planned a summer road trip down to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon with other stops along the way. After getting Elijah hooked on the videos too and getting permission from Tyla, we adjusted our route so that we are planning to visit Cerro Gordo in August!

I realize that there are a million different YouTube holes you can get sucked down, but I have found this one particularly fun and interesting. You can check it out for yourself here: Ghost Town Living – YouTube. If watching the entire back catalog seems like a bit much, look for his annual summary videos like A Year Living In An Abandoned Ghost Town, Two Years Living In An Abandoned Ghost Town!, etc.

benmartens May 14, 2026 Links

High School Search

As I mentioned earlier, we’re planning a move to Minnesota in the summer of 2027. During Elijah’s spring break, we flew out there as a family to visit all three of the high schools that our national church body runs: West, St. Croix, and Minnesota Valley.

It felt a bit odd to be exploring all three of those schools. We knew ahead of time that they were all great and we didn’t want to give the impression that we were shopping them against each other, but it was a big help to see them all and also to drive around the three areas. They have distinct personalities and ministries. Thankfully we left thinking we could see how attending each one of them would be great, and it also got Elijah even more excited about the move.

Before we visited Minnesota Valley, we stopped in for chapel and lunch at Martin Luther College. For being a “random”, tiny college 1500 miles away from us, it’s amazing how welcome we feel when we step on campus. As soon as we got out of the car, one of the staff members saw us and waved, and when we went into the cafe, we were mobbed (in a great way) by so many people welcoming us and giving us hugs. I was especially thankful to the students that got up to come over and say hi to Elijah. It makes such a huge impression on him.

We got a lot of practice explaining our move. I’ve learned to start with “I can do my job from anywhere” and “We’ve lived in this area before”. That gets through most of the initial questions. There was also confusion at MLC because some people knew Tyla and I were coming back the following Friday for a President’s Advisory Council meeting. We thought a lot about combining the trips, but it was simpler to split them up and to do it when Elijah was on break.

That trip the following week did go smoothly as well. We are so thankful to have the opportunity to give feedback on challenges the school is facing and plans for the future. The administration is full of amazing people who put everything they have into making it the best possible training school for every pastor, teacher, and staff minister in our church body. I also got to have a good chat with their IT team to learn how they are adopting AI in their software development process.

I’m sure there will be many more trips in our future as we zero in on a specific place to live, but this was a big checkbox for us!

benmartens May 11, 2026 Family

Quotes

A couple quotes that I heard recently have been floating around in my head.

“I think if you don’t have dreams about what might happen in your life, then how do you know what you want to do next? How do you choose whether I should do this or do that if you don’t really care where you end up? … I think it’s a wonderful gift to reflect within yourself and ask what do I actually hope will happen in my life if my life goes perfectly from now on? What do I dream will happen and what am I doing today and this weekend in order to change who I am deliberately?”

– Astronaut Chris Hadfield on the Mythfits podcast, April 27, 2026

I like this one because it encourages us to have a vision and work towards it. If you just float along letting life happen to you, it’s unlikely that your situation is going to improve.

The next one comes from the creator of a popular open-source project that recently decided not to allow AI generated code submissions. While this is about code, I think it applies to AI generated text even more.

It’s a common misconception that we can’t tell who is using LLM and who is not. I’m sure we didn’t catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It’s like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn’t smoke instantly knows it.

I’m not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.

— Andrew Kelley

You can read more about their rationale for this move here. I’m not sure I totally agree with it because I think source code is becoming a generated artifact and specs are more important, I do think about this comparison to smoking every time I’m writing text and using AI to help me clean it up.

benmartens May 4, 2026 Commentary

Copilot for the Win!

I don’t blog about AI every day, but you can bet I’m using it and discussing it every day. I’m still unable to explain it to non-tech friends. It just sounds unbelievable, and if I wasn’t living through it with a front row view, I wouldn’t believe it either.

I thought it would be worth documenting again some of the projects I’ve done at home with it. Every time I say “Copilot” below, I’m talking about GitHub Copilot with unlimited, full access to everything. (This is extremely different from any free Copilot thing you’ve chatted with on the internet.)

  • My main PC was having trouble falling asleep reliably. I knew I could reboot and make it better for a while but it would keep coming back. I fired up copilot.exe and asked it why my machine wasn’t sleeping. It found that one of the apps I use (PowerAutomate) wasn’t being shutdown completely and it was keeping my machine awake. This was a tiny win but it was something I would have just lived with for a long time if it wasn’t so easy to figure it out.
  • My file server was rebooting frequently and it would get stuck at the BIOS screen when it started up. Again, I fired up copilot.exe and asked it to analyze my reboots. It analyzed my recent reboots and thought maybe it was an old video driver so I updated that. The next day I had it look again and it identified two of my four hard drives were going bad! It wasn’t enough for Windows to report them as being bad in Storage Spaces yet, but I kept asking for more and more proof and was finally convinced that they really were bad. These were two 8TB drives but thankfully the two 12TB drives were healthy and could handle the full file storage requirements on their own. Hard drive prices are extreme right now so I just removed the bad drives and will live with the 12TB drives (in a mirror configuration) for now. Along the way, Copilot also wrote a Powershell script for me that stores off the SMART data from the drives periodically in a CSV so I can monitor health over time.
  • As I was listening to Spotify, I got curious to look at some stats about my listening habits. For example, if I took all my listening over the past year, looked up the year the songs were originally released, and made a histogram, what would it look like? Copilot made quick work of helping me set up a Spotify developer account, connecting to the API, and writing a tool that would periodically pull my usage going forward. It also showed me how to request my previous year of listening history from Spotify. I haven’t gotten around to analyzing it all yet, but I’m collecting the data now.
  • When we show videos on the screen in front of church, I usually re-edit them to add a black screen at the start so that I can leave it paused on that black screen throughout the service and not distract anyone until we’re ready for it. I realized that I could probably automate that, and sure enough, in about 15 minutes, I had a powershell script that automates ffmpeg to do this. As a bonus, I did that whole project by chatting with Copilot through the GitHub app on my phone while I was cooking dinner.
  • As we think about moving, we’re curious how far various properties are from places we care about (school, Costco, home improvement stores, grocery stores, etc.) Copilot wrote me an app that uses a mapping resource in my Azure subscription to run all this analysis and report it back.
  • I was thinking about paying for a ChatGPT subscription to remove the limitations and see how it worked when not in free mode, but then I realized that my Azure subscription can host all of these models. So Copilot wrote me ChatGPT clone that runs on my PC or my phone and uses models hosted in my own Azure subscription. As a bonus, I can use whatever models I want, crank them up as high as I want, and not be limited. (Yes it costs money but I get $150/month for free and that goes a long way.)

It’s a blast being a nerd right now. The cost of experimentation and ideation is approaching zero. You’re only limited by your ambition and imagination and so far that hasn’t been a problem for me!

benmartens April 27, 2026 Geek

Gas Prices

For the last ~6 years, I’ve watched gas prices mostly as a curiosity since my truck stayed parked in the driveway most days, but now that I’m driving back and forth to work, I feel the pain of those $100 fill-ups. But how bad is it compared to the past few years?

Since March of 2022, I have been running an app to record a half dozen gas stations close to me every day. I use this to carefully calculate how much money we are saving with the Tesla compared to a gas car. Here’s the chart:

So they are high but not quite as bad as when Russia invaded Ukraine. We live in a nice little pocket of reasonably priced gas, but there are currently some stations at $5.99 for gas and over $7.29 for diesel. Ouch.

I wonder what we’ll think when we look back at this post in 10 years.

benmartens April 23, 2026 Commentary