Aldo Hoeben

Aldo Hoeben is one of the most prolific contributors to Ultimaker Cura. His plugins for the open-source slicing software have accumulated more than 1 million downloads – and his GitHub username, fieldofview, is a fixture on Ultimaker Cura update blogs and release notes.

Aldo, who is based in the Netherlands, first purchased a 3D printer – an Ultimaker Original – in 2013. He soon started working with OctoPrint on an original Raspberry Pi in an attempt to create an integrated workflow from Ultimaker Cura to OctoPrint. In 2015, he was invited to join the Ultimaker team to prepare Ultimaker Cura for the then-forthcoming Ultimaker 3.

“It also resulted in writing a plugin to integrate printing via OctoPrint and monitoring the progress right inside Cura,” Aldo says. “That plugin is now used to start thousands of prints per day by users all over the world.”

Aldo is now self-employed, but continues to create and submit plugins for Ultimaker Cura.

My hands always worked better on a keyboard than on a lathe or with clay. With my 3D printer, I could finally get physical models that were much closer to the ideas in my head. Now, if I want to make something physical, I can. That was a very liberating realization.