Building things slowly

Posted: 2026-07-11

I like building things slowly.

At work, when I build software, there’s always a deadline or a critical path to consider. It is very rare that I get to build something at my own pace.

This is why I do my hobby projects very slowly.

In my hobby projects, I usually pick a language that I’d love to explore more. Then I pick a project to build. The size of the project doesn’t matter - I am probably not going to finish it anyway. I break it down into parts and slowly build each one. For me, coding is most enjoyable this way. Slow, free, deliberate.

Right now, I am writing a redis clone in C++. I have never done a complete project in C++. I have explored redis internals before, though. So I built a REPL. I refactored it. I removed it entirely and added a simpler one. Then I built a very basic store. It sucked. I referred to other people’s code and asked the machine spirits (LLMs) for guidance.

Then I went on a tangent adding a C++ LSP to my emacs and ended up refactoring my emacs config files a bit. Then I came back to redis and decided I wanted unit tests. I didn’t add unit tests. Instead, I started working on a HTTP server.

I could say I learned a lot doing all this. I did. But that was not the goal. The goal was to enjoy the act of creation. To explore and to experience. To decide, design, and destroy with no consequences. It is a sandbox and I am a child with a shovel.

What I realized is that I am just trying to stay in that part of programming that I love the most. Building software is not just about writing code. In a professional setting, there would be the aforementioned deadlines. There would be meetings, retrospectives, and that really annoying coworker. The job market might be uncertain. The managers might be overbearing. The whole C-suite might be drinking the latest Kool-Aid.

People in tech will tell you that this is the norm in the industry. You cannot really skip this. I am not complaining though. If there were a job where I can skip all this and just write code at my own pace, I would pick it. But I understand that this is the job, and I love doing the job. I find that I can keep up my love for programming intact because I like building things slowly.

But nothing in the industry comes close to the freedom and the joy of hobby projects. It does teach me things and ‘expand my horizons’, so to speak. But that is not why I do it. I do it for the sheer joy of finally figuring out the solution to a problem, realizing how obvious it is and how stupid I was being, deleting a dozen debug logs, and writing a commit message with a terrible pun in it, grinning stupidly all the while.