tin·ker

/ˈtiNGkər/

to make small changes to something, especially in an attempt to repair or improve it.

In Hindsight

Growing up, I never stuck to a single thing, be it guitar lessons, art school, martial arts – I tried them all. when it came to programming, though, I never really tinkered. I was always amazed with video games and wondered how they were made but I never pursued that curiosity.

My tinkering habits picked up very late, and now I cannot go by without picking up new things in one form or another. It's how I learn. I wish I did it sooner. It's a major part of my learning process now, and I would never be the programmer person I am today.

What the hell is tinkering?

Have you ever spent hours tweaking the mouse sensitivity in your favorite FPS game?

Have you ever installed a Linux distro, spent days configuring window managers, not because you had to, but purely because it gave you satisfaction and made your workflow exactly yours?

Ever pulled apart your mechanical keyboard, swapped keycaps, tested switches, and lubed stabilizers just for more thock?

That is what I mean.

I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. The ideal, of course, is to be a mix of both.

when you tinker and throw away, that's practice, and practice should inherently be ephemeral, exploratory, and be frequent - @ludwigABAP

My approach to tinkering

There are plenty of people who still use the VSCode terminal as their default terminal, do not know what vim bindings are, GitHub desktop rather than the cli (at the very least). I'm not saying these are bad things necessarily, just that this should be the minimum, not the median.

This does not mean I spend every waking hour fiddling with my neovim config. In fact, the last meaningful change to my config was 6 months ago. Finding that balance is where most people fail.

Over the years I have done so many things that in hindsight have made me appreciate programming more but were completely "unnecessary" in the strict sense.

In the past week I have, for the first time, written a glsl fragment shader, a rust procedural macro, template c++, a swift app, furthered my hatred for windows development (this is not new), and started using the helix editor more (mainly for good defaults + speed). I didn't have to do these things, but I did, for fun! And I know more about these things now.

No time spent learning, is time wasted.

Why taste matters, especially now

Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don't like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.

And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone's taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.

Question the status quo, experiment, break things, do this several times, do this everyday and keep doing it.