Hacker Perspective: Matt Desmarais
To me, being a hacker has never been about breaking into things; it's about breaking things open. It's about seeing what's underneath, how it really works, and what else it could become if you ignored the rules written on the packaging. A hacker isn't someone who causes chaos; a hacker is someone who refuses to accept ignorance. The label has been distorted over time, but at its core, hacking is simply curiosity made physical. It's the art of looking at something that already exists and wondering, "What happens if I do this instead?" That single question, repeated over and over, has shaped everything I've built, broken, and learned.
My hacker philosophy starts with the belief that curiosity is sacred. Curiosity is the drive that keeps me awake at night, the spark that makes me take something apart even when I probably shouldn't. Every project begins with a tiny itch of "Can I?" or "What if?" It's rarely about solving a grand problem; it's about chasing a question until it transforms into something tangible. I don't wait for inspiration or perfect tools. I start with what I have, a handful of parts, a soldering iron, and a vague idea and let the process teach me what I didn't know. That's the hacker's loop: experiment, fail, learn, repeat.
A hacker thrives on limitations because constraints are where innovation hides. When you only have a cheap board, a sensor, and some wire, every solution has to be clever. That's what makes it beautiful. Hacking is the opposite of luxury engineering; it's about making something extraordinary out of something ordinary. A hacker's elegance comes from necessity, not abundance. The less the system gives you, the more you have to think, and that thinking becomes craft.
A hacker doesn't measure success by polish. Function comes first; aesthetics can wait. Sometimes the result looks messy, tape holding a sensor in place, code that grew in layers, a 3D print that isn't perfectly sanded but that' fine. The real beauty lies in the fact that it works. When something you built with imperfect tools performs perfectly, that's art. People who don't understand hacking think it's about perfection or rebellion, but it's neither. It's about understanding. Once you understand something deeply, you can shape it with confidence.
Being a hacker means you never fully trust abstractions. You respect them, but you want to see what's underneath. Every modern tool hides layers of complexity that most people never think about: code, protocols, firmware. The hacker's instinct is to peel those layers back. Not out of distrust, but out of hunger for comprehension. When you know how something really works, you're no longer a passenger; you're in control. That control is addictive, not in a power-hungry way but in an empowering one. It's the satisfaction of knowing you can fix what breaks because you truly understand why it broke.
The hacker mindset also means accepting that failure is part of the process. Every burned component, every segmentation fault, every bad connection is a teacher. I've learned more from failures than from any clean build. Success teaches confirmation; failure teaches insight. A hacker doesn't see a malfunction as defeat; they see it as data. Each problem reveals another layer of truth about how the system behaves. The only real mistake is giving up before you learn something.
I became a hacker the way most hackers do by never growing out of that childhood instinct to take things apart. Long before I wrote my first line of code, I was already disassembling anything that could be opened with a screwdriver. Toys, radios, telephones, whatever I could get away with. I wasn't trying to fix them or even improve them; I just wanted to see the mystery inside. I wanted to understand why pressing a button made something light up or how sound traveled through a speaker. Every discovery was a small victory against not knowing.
The first time I remember using a computer was when I was in first grade during a parent-teacher conference. I was sent out to the computer that was in the hallway. After a couple minutes of looking at it, I knocked on the door and told the teacher I didn't know how to turn it on. She came over and showed me where the power button was. I said thanks and watched it start up. There were games on this computer. I fired up Snoopy's Game Club, and by the time I was having fun, the conference was over and my obsession with computers and games began.
In second grade, we had two computers in the classroom. I knew how to turn one of them on and launch games, so I would do that. Other kids would shoulder surf and ask questions while I played until the teacher told me my time was up. The other computer in the room that no one used was an Apple IIGS that didn't have a mouse. I looked it over, found the power switch in the back and flipped it. The computer came to life, but it was not familiar. I was on my first command line. I typed help and actually got help, enough that I eventually figured out how to load Odell Lake and start playing. The second game sounds started coming out of that computer, the other kids started shoulder surfing and asking questions again and the teacher told me my time was up.
In third grade, we started going to the library to use the new iMacs, which had Internet access with Netscape Navigator. I searched for games, clicked the first result, and was defeated by the Internet filter. I tried other links and I would always get the same screen. Eventually I clicked a link somewhere and got to a game. I was puzzled as to how it wasn't blocked, so I examined the URL. The URL didn't start with www - it was just http://example.com. I went back to the search results and clicked http://www.newgrounds.com which I knew was blocked. I removed the www. from the URL and that was the ticket - it worked! No one saw what I did and I didn't tell any of the other kids about this because I knew they would ruin it. From that point on til we moved early on in sixth grade I had Internet access anytime we went to the library for class or to work on presentations, I was the only boy that would sit in the middle of gossiping girls because they did not care what I was up to. I played games and explored the Internet.
Once I got to high school I took three years of programming, one year of C++, and two years of Java. I would complete assignments, but would not really know what I was doing for about two years when I started writing my own games. I was still obsessed with video games from when I was young until I was 24. I read about something called a Raspberry Pi. Instead of buying Halo 4 and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, I ordered two Model Bs and accessories. I started learning Linux and Python at my own pace in ways that were interesting to me. For the first couple years, I didn't really do anything all that interesting, just gaining experience and learning. Each project became a stepping stone in understanding something deeper. I would follow tutorials to learn about different components and how to use them, building my own problem solving project toolbox. In 2014, I bought a Google Glass because it looked cool and I was very interested in heads-up displays. I was super excited to have "future tech" on my head until I realized the state of development for the platform. I played with it for a few months and then lost interest, and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.
Eventually I started building my own creations, some out of curiosity, some out of necessity. In 2017, the Pi Zero W came out and I had the idea to make PiGlass, a DIY heads-up display wearable similar to the Glass that disappointed me so much. I didn't care what it looked like or how it felt to wear it; I just wanted a heads-up display, I didn't know how to make one, so I was going for something COTS. I found a product called Vufine which is a wearable heads-up HDMI display for $200. I strapped the Pi Zero W to the Vufine with zip ties and added a Pi Zero spy camera. I soon had the basics going and was able to take pictures, barely livestream, and watch YouTube, but I didn't have audio. My solution was to wire an amp board to the GPIO and then use a bone conduction transducer shrink-wrapped to the frame of some safety glasses. It was super janky but it worked. I experimented with it for a year or so and eventually ran out of things I could get it to do.
In 2021, the Pi Zero 2 was announced and I instantly perked up and thought I could finally revisit PiGlass and make V2. I ended up redesigning it completely with lessons I learned. The Pi Zero 2 is mounted on the back strap of a baseball cap with zip ties. It looked a lot better and felt a lot better to wear, which were welcome improvements. I was very familiar with the picamera API at this point, so I was able to create my own picamera GUI application launcher with a gamepad. I could launch Kodi, RetroPie, or any program that would work with the gamepad of which I made several. This was undoubtedly one of the coolest things I created on my own. I could do all the things I wanted to be able to do with Google Glass.
I was sharing my PiGlass V2 learn guide on social media when someone named Greg Newby left a comment saying call for participation was still open for A New HOPE and that this could be a good workshop or a talk, so I submitted something which was rejected. I had some conversations with Greg about how I could improve my talk proposal. We went back and forth for a while until I resubmitted and was accepted. I gave a talk about PiGlass V2 and my volunteer work at the local food pantry where I made all kinds of things from IoT alarms to an SMS ordering system. It was an eye opening experience. I finally connected with other hackers.
Somewhere along the way on my journey, I realized hacking wasn't limited to electronics. It's a mental model that applies to everything: systems, habits, communication, even people. Once you start thinking like a hacker, you see patterns everywhere. You start analyzing not just what works, but why it works, and how to make it better or stranger or more efficient. It becomes second nature to optimize. You can't help it. You'll rewire a workflow just to shave off a few steps, not because you need to, but because you can't stand inefficiency when the fix is obvious.
The hacker's world is built on layers of understanding. There's always another layer to peel back, another secret to uncover. No matter how much I learn, there's always a lower level I haven't touched yet, a protocol I haven't dissected, a timing issue I haven't chased, an error I haven't encountered. That infinite depth is what keeps hacking exciting. It's impossible to reach the bottom, and that's the point. Curiosity doesn't end; it evolves.
Hacking also carries an ethical dimension. There's a difference between breaking something to harm and breaking something while learning. The hacker I strive to be practices curiosity with respect: respect for people, for systems, for boundaries that exist for safety rather than secrecy. I believe in openness, not greed. Information should be free in the sense that understanding should be accessible. Locking knowledge behind obscurity only breeds dependence. The hacker's role is to illuminate, not exploit. Every time someone explains how a system really works, the world becomes slightly less mysterious and slightly more fair.
Code, to me, is both a tool and language. It's how you talk to machines, but it's also how you think clearly. Writing code teaches precision, patience, and humility. The best code is not the most complex; it's the most understandable. A good program is like a well-written sentence - simple, direct, and elegant. When I write code, I'm not just instructing a computer; I'm teaching myself how to think. Debugging, meanwhile, is meditation. It demands focus, honesty, and persistence. You can't lie to a compiler or to yourself; it either works or it doesn't. The process of making it work is strangely human.
The same goes for hardware. A breadboard, a sensor, a power supply, these are instruments. You learn their quirks like you'd learn the tone of a musical instrument. You know when a wire isn't seated right just by how it feels. You hear when voltage is off by the faint hum of a regulator. The more time you spend with hardware, the more it becomes intuitive. It's not magic; it's muscle memory built on thousands of experiments, some successful, most not.
Being a hacker also means living in a permanent state of learning. Technology changes faster than anyone can keep up with, but the hacker mindset adapts. The specific tools don't matter; curiosity does. Whether it's a modern AI accelerator, a decades-old terminal, or an embedded board no one remembers, the same principle applies: figure it out, make it do something new, document it, and share it. The joy isn't in ownership; it's in discovery.
People often ask why I keep doing it, why I still tinker, why I still build things that may never serve a purpose beyond proving they can work. The answer is simple: because the moment something finally works, it feels like pure magic, even though I know exactly how it happened. That moment when the code runs clean, when the LED blinks in rhythm, when the signal travels just right: that's satisfaction distilled. It's proof that curiosity, persistence, and understanding can literally shape reality.
That's what it means to be a hacker. It's not about rebellion; it's about freedom, the freedom to learn, to modify, to explore without permission. It's about the confidence that comes from knowing you can make sense of the world around you, no matter how opaque it seems. It's about loving problems enough to chase them until they surrender. It's about living in a constant loop of "I wonder what happens if I..." and actually finding out.
I didn't choose to become a hacker. It just happened slowly, through curiosity that refused to fade. Every wire I connected, every terminal I configured, every bug I chased brought me closer to understanding not just how machines work, but how I work. The hacker mindset reshapes your brain until everything becomes a puzzle worth solving. And once you see the world that way, there's no going back. You don't wait for solutions anymore, you build them. You don't accept limits; you test them. You don't look for magic; you make it.
That's who I am: someone who keeps taking things apart to understand why they worked in the first place, someone who builds not for perfection but for function, and someone who believes that curiosity - the pure, persistent kind - is the closest thing to real freedom there is.
Matt Desmarais (a.k.a. Matt the Maker) is still curious as ever, exploring lots of open-source projects. That curiosity contributed to a Home Assistant obsession, powering the extensive automation behind a small computer museum that doubles as the home of the Hyannis 2600 meetings.