Toys

My boss liked to poke at me because of how much I enjoy my “toys:” the little tools, tricks, and habits I’ve picked up over the last five years. But I’m starting to learn  the toys I play with have a profound effect on the decisions I seem to make.

Let me be clear: he was never hurtful. It just shows how different we approached our identities as developers beyond our immediate work where we held so many of the same opinions.

Does it really matter if I like Carbon to make source code snippets look nice? Probably not. It’s just a toy and there are a hundred other ways to share code snippets. But I bet I also read a lot more 🔥tips on twitter than he does, and in that circle of devs Carbon is super common. People like us share code like this.

Terminal vs Hyper. Google Docs vs Simplenote. Plain text vs Markdown. QWERTY vs Colemak. It would come up all the time how not only did I not use what everyone else used, but I very much loved my choice for one reason or another. The point being not that we disagreed, but that it seemed kind of silly that I would spend time even considering my preferred toy when the normal kind does just fine.

Toys are Tools When Work is Play

It might be my downfall one day, but my love of the tools in my craft is part of why I love the craft itself. I spend too many hours a day trying to make good art not to feel like my tools are helping me instead of hurting. Software, hardware, my chair and desk (yes, I have a sit/stand desk) have all been carefully improved upon bit by bit for a long time. And the more I feel at home with these tools, the more my art is just a game I play.