If you don't tinker, you don't have taste

Appreciation

Importance

Date Added

10.30.25

TLDR

Tinkering = doing things just because. (Fiddling with, breaking apart, building things out of pure interest; side projects don't count). Tinkering builds taste because you get to iterate, discard, and sample a ton.

2 Cents

Concise and inspiring read. Some point along the way I stopped tinkering (even small things, e.g., I used add ligatures into my VSCode font), and I think calling it a “lost art” is really fitting.

Tags

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

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.

And here is a thread with comments I found neat.