About Dan Kraus

Hey. I’m a maker of scale models and miniatures, prop replicas, and software. I pride myself as a generalist that gets interested and excited about a wide range of topics. This site exists to collect my projects and musings in one place.

Professional

My day-job is in Software Engineering where I’ve worked on industrial 3d printing systems, online gambling, mortgage/real-estate marketing platforms, ecommerce apparel and chocolate, and a bunch of others. I primarily work in web applications but have done some mobile work as well. As a self-described generalist, I’ve always been drawn to working on the full stack. As an engineering manager, I get great satisfaction working with stakeholders across the business, coaching and mentoring developing engineers, and shipping valuable products and solving business problems.

Personal

I call the Boston, MA, USA area home with roots in St. Louis, MO and Long Island, NY.

You can find me spending time with my wife and dog relaxing on a couch, cooking, eating local seafood, enjoying a brewery or cocktail bar, trying to take a decent photo, or seeing some live music. I’m a hockey fan rooting for the St. Louis Blues.

A lot of my free time is spent building and painting models and prop replicas from my favorite movies and TV shows (ok, almost entirely just Star Wars to be honest). Ships, droids, lightsabers, blasters, helmets, miniature figures, etc. This site will be a place to document my in-progress and completed projects. I’ve learned a lot from other others have published on the internet and so I’d like to contribute back. If you have a question or want to chat about anything I’m working on, drop me a note on any of my socials.

About This Site

I decided to re-establish my place on the web after wistfully remembering the former diverse personal home pages, fan sites, and special interest sites that were so prevalent on the web like Geocities, Tripod, Angelfire, and so many others in my formative years on the internet. So much of what we publish online is now only in the hands of a few mega-corporations where we exist as a product to be monetized at the whims of billionaires. This site was built with Astro, as a statically generated site.

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” - Carl Sagan