At Maker Faire Shenzhen, what’s never in short supply are maker masters and tech experts from all walks of life, possessing abundant professional knowledge and powerful skills. From universities, laboratories, companies, and factories, they gather on this boundary-breaking maker stage.
Beyond that, you’ll encounter many “unconventional types” here: they’re not formally trained, lack strong technical backgrounds, and before creating their first work, knew absolutely nothing about technology. But none of this stopped them from starting to create.
Among them, Mat Zolnierczyk’s experience is perhaps the best annotation of “maker super-evolution”: Mat is from Poland, a robotics and automation engineer working and living in the UK, and he also runs his own YouTube channel and personal website.
From an art student who started self-learning, to ultimately becoming a robotics engineer. His nearly decade-long maker evolution journey proves to everyone that all you need to become a maker is a heart that wants to create and boundless enthusiasm. At the end of this article, there’s a video of Mat’s live presentation at MFSZ, so stick around!
Finding Passion Through Creation: An Art Graduate Can Be A Maker
Mat’s career path and experience has been quite winding. He candidly admits: “Choosing to study art wasn’t my first choice.” After failing his Polish language exam, post-high school Mat chose to enter art school, becoming an art student.
“That was actually pretty cool, because your final exam was sketching a group of models, rather than racking your brain over densely packed test papers.” But his job-hunting journey wasn’t smooth: “When you’re facing several interviewers just to get a job, the ability to sketch half-naked models doesn’t seem all that impressive.”
After that, Mat had several jobs: working for online websites, working in a meat factory. This is how he evaluated himself at that time: “I had almost no experience in anything, and almost no clue what to do next. For someone already over thirty, this obviously wasn’t a great life plan.”
At 33, he decided to find his answers on the road. Starting from his hometown Poland, armed with just a map, he cycled south to Italy, then west to France, crossed the English Channel by boat, and finally arrived in central England.
This over 2,000-kilometer journey led Mat to rethink his future path: continue living this way until midlife crisis arrives, then buy a nice car to comfort himself he’s “still young”? Or break free from his uneventful daily routine, rediscover his passion, and find a new direction for his life?
Mat, who came to MFSZ25, clearly chose the latter—to start learning electronics and programming, to become a maker.
Starting Maker Training from Zero
So, in his spare time, Mat entered the scenario he mentioned at the beginning of his speech: a pen, a thick stack of paper, 100 web pages filled with search results. While beginning to learn and accumulate, creating his own projects, he started sharing his ideas online. After receiving attention from others, he began running his own webpage and YouTube channel.
“I had to wear multiple hats simultaneously, doing everything the CEO, accountant, and every other position had to do.” This career starting from zero took up almost all of Mat’s time outside of work, but it also helped him rediscover his long-lost passion and sense of direction in life.
“I became a useless person who bestowed upon myself many titles. I’m not particularly outstanding, but I’m particularly stubborn about these things, doing my utmost to complete them in an organized manner.”
This enthusiasm and persistence ultimately brought Mat unexpected opportunities: during a major traffic jam, Mat received an interview call from his current company. After a series of questions and follow-up interviews, Mat got a new job: robotics engineer.
“From self-learning Arduino to control robot servo systems, to operating robots worth several times my annual salary, while controlling them to not punch a big hole in the wall—this was undoubtedly a huge leap.”
Turning Impostor Syndrome into Motivation
Now, Mat works as a mechanical engineer at AutoLabman Automation, providing robotics and automation services to well-known companies like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson. And where he works is precisely the final stop of his cycling journey years ago: England.
“Everyone around me knows more than I do, I have so much to learn that by the end of the day, I feel like my brain is about to explode.” Entering a completely new industry he’d never touched before, Mat was seized by intense impostor syndrome, for which he also went through a period of struggle.
Now, he’s learned to calmly accept and embrace this fear, transforming it into motivation: “You’ll always be afraid. You’ll always feel like everyone around you knows more than you do. Over time, this won’t disappear. You just learn to use that fear to motivate you, to make you better.”
Two days before arriving in Shenzhen to participate in MFSZ25, Mat had just celebrated his 42nd birthday. Looking back on nearly the past decade’s experiences, on rediscovering his passion and life direction through creation, then opening up his new career driven by enthusiasm.
Mat shared with us his valuable insights and experience: use documentation to record, manage, and share your work process, as well as the ideas generated during the process. “What really helped me find work in the robotics industry were unexpected small things. Not my fans, not the videos I made, but just simple things I was doing as part of my daily routine anyway.”
Continuously accumulate experience from failures and successes until they’re seen by more people and bring you rewards. At the same time, always pursue better, “develop the habit of doing things 100%, even if you ultimately fail.” When the goals you pursue exceed 100%, they can continuously approach perfection.
From an art student, from self-learning to becoming a robotics engineer, Mat used his evolution story to illustrate the most important point for us: don’t set limits for yourself, you can always create infinite possibilities for yourself. No matter your age, it’s never too late to make a change.
Mat Zolnierczyk | From Zero to Engineering Superhero
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As the organizer of Maker Faire Shenzhen, Chaihuo Makerspace has been committed to creating a continuously active innovation community for hard tech and maker culture. Beyond the annual summit, we plan and host various maker workshops, tech sharing sessions, hackathons and other events every week, exchanging ideas and sparking inspiration together with makers, engineers, designers and tech enthusiasts from around the world.
We welcome all who love hard tech and innovation to follow and join us in exploring future possibilities together!
