The Spark for Tinkering

I started coding over 20 years ago. That number is nuts to think about. It's crazier to think about what all has happened in those 20 years. A diploma, a degree, a marriage, a masters, a child, aging parents, and 11 years of industry experience across two companies. Somewhere along the lines my priorities shifted and I stopped tinkering for fun.

Now don't get me wrong, my work never became unexciting to me. Even if it's not technical or cutting edge and I'm just putting in a quick feature or a light refactor, to this day I adore software engineering. I love the critical thinking and the creative process of building something to be extensible and scalable. I consider myself in a rare group of people who genuinely loves the skillset they get paid for.

But tinkering is different. For me, tinkering is about more than understanding a technology, it's about playing with it for fun. Doing it not just to upskill and add a bullet to a resume, doing it because I truly enjoy seeing how something works and knowing it for the future. Doing it because I want to and not because I have to.

Don't I try new technologies at work and isn't that tinkering? Sure I do, and sure it is, when there is a tech that seems like a fit for whatever project I'm working on. But tech changes fast, and what a project needs doesn't always stretch into something that I don't know. I'm a firm believer that we use tech to build the product, not pick a tech and then find a way to incorporate it into a product. As such, a lot of tech gets left behind.

So when did I stop tinkering for fun? I'm not sure. Probably sometime around when my kiddo was born. Maybe a bit before that. Life got full of meaning when my daughter was born. The intention that I used to put on tech and learning became more placed on how to change diapers, how to anchor furniture, how to inspire creativity and joy to a growing, living being. That became my new biggest passion.

But growth is part of this craft, and I have room again to be intentional about it. So what do I do about it? My thought is, I still love coding, design, and technology, so why not bring back playing with things just for fun? And that's what my blog will be about. Covering the gap between what I know and what I want to know by using one of my passions which is building. Some of these will be presenting technical projects, some may be about how do i find the time, some may be just a summary of research or just me talking about some new pattern

I have several fun project ideas in my head, and my first one is building out a Kubernetes cluster from scratch. And spoiler alert, if you're reading this, the experiment worked. You are reading a blog served by my Kubernetes cluster.

Until next time

My use of AI in Blogs

While I do use AI for coding, I want the words in my blog to represent myself, my thought process, and my own personal findings. Sure I think there is an art to coding as well, but human language is so individualistic that I like to think that my language is what is presented here.

As of right now, the start of this blog, I intend to use AI to learn and build, but no AI for the actual writing of whatever blog post. Including proofreading, as noted by my probably more than one grammatical mistake here.

Should this change in the future, I'll be honest and transparent about that. But for now, this is me, Charlie Willis, presenting my authentic thoughts and self.