Tony Hansen

The developer at

But my first love is pottery
https://tonyhansen.com/pottery

Message me at Digitalfire.com or follow me at
       

Tony Hansen is a potter, a technician at Plainsman Clays, a product developer and internationally known web content creator, a programmer, graphic artist, author, educator and dreamer.

Pottery

Since the first time he saw someone making a piece on the potters wheel, Tony has been captivated by ceramics. Tony is an accomplished potter. His work at Plainsman Clays, from 1973, developing products and serving thousands of customers, was a catalyst for early technical development. As a potter, he focusses on functional ware, mainly mugs, producing messaging on "true quality" above just simple aesthetics or sloppy production. He does not exhibit, all effort is channeled into creating online resources. Tony does not sell his ware. Pieces are broken, given away or kept for demonstration. His pottery store, at https://tonyhansen.com/pottery, is not a store, rather a showcase on how each piece was made, with links into digitafire.com for comprehensive technical detail. Tony is a champion of DIY (in a pottery world becoming increasingly distant from basic knowledge and basic skills). Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of images of his work can be found by Googling.

Early Focus on Ceramic Industry

• From the 1980s, Tony's original desktop Insight software was used to make everything from spark plugs to refractories, light bulbs to ceramic tile, frits and glazes to sinks and toilets, electrical insulators to fine china and tableware.
• Tony's DOS 4Sight Ceramic Database of the 1990s grew into Insight-Live, the main LIMS used today.
• Tony's 1995 article in Ceramic Technology International introduced readers to “Database Technology to Empower Ceramic Professionals”.
• Tony's 1998 presentation at the 101st conference of the American Ceramic Society in Indianapolis introduced attenders to "The Internet".
• He was invited by two Prime Ministers on Team Canada trade missions during this time.

In those years, Tony was well-travelled in the ceramic industry, attending, exhibiting and lecturing at international events. His early technical articles and software ads were hosted in trade industry publications and his products referenced in textbooks. This led to connections with key players and hosting and financing the ceramic consultants database. However, it became apparent that targetting efforts at industry would price his services out of the range of ordinary people. Thus, putting affordable information and tools in the hands of everyone became to objective by the year 2000.

Change in Focus To Craft/Hobby/Art Ceramics

Around 2000 it became clear that the priorities needed to gain acceptance into industrial labs were in conflict to what he wanted. At the same time, exciting technology, previously unavaible to potters was emerging as affortable and accessible. So Tony changed his focus to potters, educators and hobbyists. Being totally open.

• Tony creates content to help anyone automate, improve, problem solve pottery and ceramic production.
• He has long experience in researching and testing the clay resources of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada.
• Almost none of his work is proprietary, his research and problem solving projects are freely available and documented online.
• Tony's methods, software and published reference materials are employed widely by technicians and supply companies to formulate and maintain their glazes, engobes, underglazes and clay bodies.
• Through digitalfire.com, offers help on a wide range of ceramic fabrication techniques, cost reduction strategies, glaze and body formulation, especially the application of chemistry to understanding glazes.
• Tony's glaze and porcelain recipes are used and adjusted throughout the world (and are documented thoroughly at digitalfire).
• His online 5000-page ceramic materials database is the top material technical information destination for traditional ceramics.
• Tony is on the leading edge of 3D design and 3D printing as they pertain to making molds, cutters, tools, templates, etc for ceramics. His Fusion 360 and OnShape tutorials are widely used in education.
• Tony has many years of experience in integrating a system to manage SDS and MSDS data to enable auto-publishing of the sheets and product labels (HTML or PDF), he has a thorough understanding of the international GHS SDS standard.
• His background of testing and development, backed by meticulous records and data, puts him at the ready to tune existing products and introduce new ones at a rapid rate.

Plainsman Clays - 1973-2025

The company has between five and ten thousand customers who use its clay bodies in school, hobby, pottery and manufacturing. Tony has been at the centre of its operations for many decades continues to maintain customer service, the LIMS system, the websites, the knowledge-base, etc.

• He has been developing and perfecting clay body, porcelain and glaze formulation and testing methods since the late 1970s.
• Luke Lindoe, founder of Plainsman Clays, personally tutored him to carry on the ideal of developing local clay resources and understanding clay physics.
• Developed and maintained all product recipes
• Developed testing procedures, lab software to handle simultaneous testing on hundreds of projects
• Directed and worked in the lab testing and quality control department for decades
• Developed all of the SDS, MSDS, data and product usage sheets
• Co-directed raw material minings and material characterizations and evaluations since the 1970s
• Created websites for Plainsman and its stores, and a management dashboard for many aspects of its operation
• Created the multi-store product database manager, the database itself, and the publish-to-website system
• Created and maintains the Plainsman blog
• Created social media posting system and syndication to two dozen platforms/groups
• Created product support/reference library of 5000 pages
• Created product label management system, templates, linkages to product database
• Created hundreds of glaze recipes used by customers and worldwide
• Created CRM system to maintain connection and history with thousands of customers
• Helped thousands of customers solve their problems, utilize the products
• Created countless instructional videos and a tech support system
• Created advertising, workshop and trade show materials for the history of company
• As a teen, worked on the construction of the plant (contracted by his father).

Programming, IT, Productivity

As a coder right from the beginning, Tony was able to automate every task and bat far beyond what would be possible by an individual.

• Tony has been a web developer/programmer since 1995, specializing in economic minimalist solutions that run securely and fast. He was among the first in North America to sell online.
• He embraced productivity tools early (e.g. Excel, Powerpoint, Word, desktop publishing, vector/pixel image editing).
• He also embraced the movement away from desktop and spreadsheets towards the cloud and databases (and their programming languages) during the 1990s.
• Tony developed early skills as a programmer by writing and maintaining multi-user inventory management, purchasing, pick list, warehouse location and costing software, it was used to manage tens of thousands of products at a warehouse and many locations.
• Tony was an early adopter of computer graphics and publishing software (bit image and vector), he self-published PDF software manuals and books by the late 1980s.
• Tony wrote desktop Insight glaze chemistry software for use by ceramic engineers and technicians.
• Tony created the principal online technical reference website for traditional ceramics at digitalfire.com.
• Tony created insight-live.com as the first ceramics-targeted LIMS (laboratory information management system), transitioning the company to a virtual MSP.
• Tony is an early adopter of AI tools, methods and programming toolkits - finding ever more ways to incorporate them into ceramics.
• Tony is an API developer and consumer, having a deep understanding of the REST API architecture and the JSON data format for inter-server and app-server communication.
• Tony has a thorough understanding of the programmatic generation of labels in HTML, PDF and ZPL formats.
• Tony is a firm believer in "infrastructure as code", task automation and the use of open source software to build and maintain systems.
• Tony is a promoter of CRM tools and has been developing and using them since the 1990s.
• Tony was an early adopter of group collaboration tools.
• Tony understands SEO and places at the top of Google searches for his name and hundreds of ceramic-related terms.
• Tony is an avid user and developer of social media posting tools and APIs, he publishes thousands of posts on a dozen platforms, managing synchronization with multiple blogs and reposting when content is updated.

Work Ethic

• Tony prioritizes personal relationships, trust, quality-of-work and integrity to principle.
• For references keep reading and refreshing the Digitalfire home page (under the heading “What people have said”), read the feedback on his channel at Ko-Fi.com or check feedback on the social media sites above).
• He is a communicator and loves working on a team with clear, sensible and ethical goals.
• He is pragmatic, evolving slowly and steadily toward long-term goals.
• He is a delegator to capable and amiable people, anxious utilize their skills and talents, a mentor sharing his knowledge and experience.
• Companies have trusted him with the privacy and integrity of their cloud and network data for decades (even including many competitors and suppliers of Plainsman Clays).
• Tony is wonderfully at home at a keyboard, a potter's wheel, a workbench or using a shovel; he does not use inefficient systems or methods, he steadily improves them.
• He excels on the energy of enthusiastic fellow workers who are willing to learn, multi-task, who focus on giving rather than taking.