The Curse of Tinkering

Tinkering often starts from a good place. You spot a small improvement, open your editor, and make a change that should only take a few minutes. Then the hours slip away. You finish with something far more complicated than what you began with. My last version of this blog followed that pattern. It started as a simple EC2 deployment, but soon grew into a full stack of ECS, Terraform, and GitHub Actions. What was meant to be a light personal site became an experiment in infrastructure design. I learned plenty about automation, pipelines, and container orchestration, but it stopped being a blog. It turned into a system that needed its own maintenance plan.

At first it felt productive. Every new layer added capability, polish, and reliability. The more tools I added, the more complete it seemed. But eventually I realised that I had turned a writing space into an engineering project. The more I improved it, the less I actually used it. I was building for the sake of building. That version of the blog taught me a lot about cloud platforms, but it also taught me how easy it is to confuse movement with progress. When you are deep in a problem, complexity can start to feel like sophistication. It is only later that you realise you have built more process than product.

Curiosity is the root of it. I learn best by doing, so I often shape projects around technologies I want to understand. When I first learned about Docker, I built it into a project that did not need containers just to see how it worked. The justification came later, after I understood it. That pattern still repeats. I add something new because it is interesting, not because it is required. The exposure is valuable, but it can easily drift from learning to distraction. Curiosity drives growth, but it also drives churn when it is not contained by purpose.

Over time I have learned to recognise that impulse earlier. At work, my thinking is more deliberate. I look at effort versus impact and try to keep the ratio sensible. If extra work adds little measurable value, it waits. Defining what “done” means helps too. Once a base level of quality or performance is reached, further optimisation should only happen with a clear reason behind it. Personal projects are harder to contain because they are driven by curiosity. They rarely have a finish line. I have learned to accept “done for now” as good enough. Sometimes that phrase is the only way a project ever reaches stability.

Perfectionism can be seductive. You tell yourself one more improvement will make the system cleaner, faster, or more elegant. Sometimes that is true, but often it only shifts complexity elsewhere. The goal is not to keep refining endlessly but to understand what “good enough” looks like in context. Continuous improvement has value, but so does knowing when to stop. Re-evaluating priorities regularly helps keep this balance. What felt urgent last week can lose its importance once you step back and look at the wider picture. Time spent maintaining something that already works might be better spent exploring the next idea.

Tinkering is still valuable. It is how I stay curious, test new approaches, and develop technical range. But experimentation without structure becomes wasteful. Testing and monitoring are what keep it honest. They prove whether a change truly improves the outcome or just shifts variables around. After you have caused or fixed a few incidents, you start to appreciate the discipline that protects good intentions from turning into failures. Curiosity should expand knowledge, not create instability.

The same principle applies to teams. My team once spread applications across many repositories because it seemed like the simplest way to start. It made sense at the time, letting us move quickly and work independently. Over time the sprawl became painful to manage. We eventually consolidated everything into a single repository. The transition took effort but brought clarity, consistency, and a shared view of the system. The early approach was not wrong; it helped us learn what did not scale. The point is not to avoid mistakes but to make them visible and learn from them before they harden into process.

That is the real balance. Tinkering teaches limits, but only if you are paying attention. The aim is not endless refinement but understanding when a system is strong enough to stand still. Engineers are drawn to motion because it feels like progress, yet stillness is often the sign of good design. Knowing when to stop is not laziness; it is confidence that something works as intended.

Tinkering will always have a place in how I learn and build. It keeps things interesting and keeps me improving. But the more I work with systems, the more I value calm over novelty. Stability is not the absence of progress. It is what allows progress to mean something when it finally happens.