Ask HN: Why do you like to tinker?

For research, I’m trying to find out the deeper motivations of why people tinker. What’s the feeling it evokes? What’s the joy?

Love to read your answers!

This question reminds me of the one from a few days ago about why people choose to work on side projects. My side projects do feel like tinkering, so if it's ok I'm going to repost my answer here with just some small wording modifications.

I have a few reasons for liking to tinker. Tinker in this context being work on software side projects with no super clear deadlines or goals.

1) It's what I'm used to. I don't remember a time since I got my first computer that I didn't have some hobby/"tinker" project on the side. If I didn't have a side project I don't know what I'd do with myself...I mean I have other hobbies, too, but my side project _is_ my main hobby.

2) To learn. I'm self-taught and the aforementioned always-having-a-tinkering-side-project point is how I learned and keep learning. I've gotten (I believe) very good at retaining information I gain through tinkering and working on my projects, and I've become proficient at picking challenges that are the perfect difficulty for me to absorb more new knowledge in areas that are relevant both to my personal interests and (sometimes indirectly) my job. Sometimes if I am not understanding a certain concept or I read something I want to grasp better, making a small project out of it or incorporating it into an existing project and trying to actually implement something helps me digest and internalise the concept.

3) It's fun. I originally started learning to code in order to be able to bring the ideas in my head to life. Those ideas haven't slowed down, so neither has my desire to bring them to life through my side projects. It is fun to work on them and I feel a sense of accomplishment in being able to turn what's in my mind into something real.

4) It helps me de-stress. My day job can be stressful and demanding, with long hours around deliveries and cert deadlines. Even though my side projects and my day job both involve programming, working on my own thing helps me de-stress after a hard day of work. Having my own project to tinker with on the side helps me avoid feeling like my entire life revolves around my job. I have something fulfilling that is just entirely mine.

This could be a longer list as there are other reasons, but I think the four I outlined above are the main reason I choose to work on side projects/tinker. Habit, learning, fun, and stress management.

For me it's all about learning. I typically pair something technical I want to learn and something more "creative" or outside of my primary skills, this way the learn success is guaranteed.

For learning to happen, I really need to build things in full, be cause typically you learn the details that really matter.

For example, I wanted to learn Android Things (Android in general), and I set myself to build a LED display. It turns out you can't control it via GPIO because on AT that's too slow, and you need an external "video card". Next, I was learning how to program an STM32.

My latest project is an open source security key. Eventually I want security keys to "embedded" in other objects, such as a piece of jewelry (again, mixing something I know and I want to get deeper at, hardware security, and something totally unknown, jewelry). This is a multi-step project, and the first phase is to release the security key. I just set up the website yesterday night, feedback welcome: https://solokeys.com