Ben Faerber

Builder of Stripy Horse · GitHub

Why listen to me about label printing?

I've spent five years as a software engineer building warehouse fulfillment systems — the software that turns orders into scannable labels on real thermal printers, at production volume, where a barcode that won't scan stops a shipping dock. My office is inside the warehouse: most people who write developer tools have never stood next to the printer their code breaks. I walk past ours every day.

Along the way I built and open-sourced the tools the work demanded:

• pdf-to-zpl — PDF-to-ZPL conversion, 26,000+ installs powering label generation in production systems around the world
• usb-scale — a Rust library for reading the USB shipping scales that sit next to those printers

Stripy Horse is those years turned into a platform: the tooling I kept wishing existed. Convert PDFs, images and HTML to ZPL with an engine cross-validated on thousands of physically printed carrier labels. Preview ZPL pixel-true. And test the whole printing pipeline against virtual Zebra printers that behave like the real firmware — status queries, fault injection, hold queues — so label bugs fail your CI build instead of your warehouse.

I write the guides here from production experience, not documentation summaries. If something's wrong or missing, tell me — I read every note personally.

Work with me

I take on a limited number of consulting projects in the space I know best: label-printing pipelines, PDF/carrier-label conversion, ZPL template systems, printer fleet integration, and warehouse fulfillment software generally. If your labels don't scan, your printers are a black box, or your fulfillment system needs someone who has shipped this before — ben@stripyhorse.io.