I’ll go first.
Ex-Air Force, military brat, grew up all-over (mostly in the rural south), settling in south-central Pennsylvania, traditionally trained as a graphic designer (started in high school) and have worked on projects ranging from drawing watches for a 3’ high point of presence display through database publishing a 2,200 page register of every food service company in the U.S., through mathematic, scientific, and legal books and textbooks, and small intricate pocket references for medical personnel, using pretty much every graphic design application, including programming TeX and LaTeX and METAPOST (and raw PostScript).
Became interested in CNC when a Bridgeport came up for sale locally for less than scrap metal value, but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in my basement (and the ceiling was too low anyway), and further searching revealed found a project called Shapeoko on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardrford/project-shapeoko-a-300-complete-cnc-machine
Bought a used machine off eBay, and began helping out with the documentation on the wiki, downloaded Scribus and worked a bit on helping out with the instructions:
When the Shapeoko 2 was launched I was offered a free machine in exchange for doing the instructions (based on a template and system which @edwardrford had worked up and in coordination with him):
http://shapeoko.github.io/Docs/
Was gifted a Shapeoko 3 as a thank you, and later an XL upgrade kit, as I worked through transitioning from volunteer through occasional freelance up to part-time off-site remote staff doing tech support.
Wanted a CNC machine to facilitate making various projects — my last major hand-tool project was:
Since getting the machine I’ve made a number of things — the first project on a Shapeoko 3 was:
and I’ve since done a variety of things posted to:
using software which includes Carbide Create, OpenSCAD (usually using the BlockSCAD graphical front-end), Inkscape (though I mostly draw in Macromedia Freehand/MX I’d recommend folks use Inkscape, Cenon, GraviT, or Serif’s Affinity Designer), and am looking into FreeCAD and CADquery.
EDIT: Like @Julien working on a book: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/