### Build hammers, forget the nails I learnt during my time at Amazon that good engineering was about finding a high value problem and then solving it. Find a nail in need of hammering, then build the hammer. It taught me to ship fast, be pragmatic, build for customers and measure what works. It was disciplined, elegant in its simplicity, and incredibly effective for business. I used to joke that Amazon was optimized to play the game of shareholder capitalism. However, after I spent five years doing that, I had inadvertently adopted the mindset that everything I touched had to be justified by some indicator of commercial value. Every hammer had to serve a purpose. And before long, engineering began to feel... soulless. So lately I’ve been craving the opposite: the joy of building for no reason other than curiosity. Like when I was a kid soldering together circuits that barely worked, or debugging things just to see what broke. I miss that feeling, the “Lifelong Kindergarten” spirit that Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab talks about, where learning happens through play, imagination, and tinkering. Where you don’t design from a spec, you design by exploring. My friend, Abhit, said something in our conversation that stuck with me: _“I build a hammer and then look for a nail to hit. Everyone says not to do that, but that’s fun for me.”_ That hit me. I’ve been trying too hard to be efficient, to make things useful. And I'm certain usefulness is crucial for business, but not all creation has to be tailored for business success. One example in the wild of this in practice is the company [Teenage Engineering](https://teenage.engineering/): an embodiment of building hammers for the sheer joy of it. Their [Swedish studio speaks of “stay curious, stay naïve, and try new things.”](https://www.sfmoma.org/read/stay-curious-stay-naive-an-interview-with-teenage-engineering-jesper-kouthoofd/) Look at one of their recent 'products': the console-sized handheld [Playdate](https://play.date) with its crank, quirky form-factor and unapologetically experimental games. I'm learning to be honest to myself that building hammers is what I want to do sometimes, and the desire to turn it into a business is purely serving false beliefs such as "fun stuff isn't useful" or "work has to always be useful". I’m realizing I want to build hammers again. Playful, maybe useless ones. Tools that make me see my own code differently. Tools that might someday find their nails, or maybe never will. And that’s okay. Maybe the joy is in swinging.