Introducing Breakable Toys

After a long hiatus, I'm back to writing a newsletter with a new and better name

Mar 10

What are breakable toys?

I wrote about breakable toys a couple of years ago on my blog. In short, breakable toys are small toy projects that you build to learn something new.

This is something I’ve been practicing a lot more in the past few months and that’s what this newsletter will be about — the things I’m learning, projects I build to reinforce the learning, and hopefully inspire you to do the same.

I certainly didn’t coin the word. That credit goes to a wonderful book called Apprenticeship Patterns. It’s a book designed for budding software engineers but this particular concept applies no matter where you are in your programming career.

I believe building small tools and projects for ourselves without the pressure of making them “successful” is the best way to learn. Failure is okay because we’re optimizing for learning. Everything else is secondary.

And if a project interests others, then that’s great. If enough people like it for you to monetize it, even better! This is an exploratory journey, one of self-discovery, that we will take because it’s fun to build things. Us programmers can create cool things from nothing and that’s a superpower. Let’s put that superpower to full use.

In this newsletter, I will share with you:

my process for building side projects
getting ideas that actually interest you (aka don’t build another todo app)
how to have fun and not get discouraged
getting out of your comfort zone
projects I’m working on, things I’m learning, and resources that make that learning happen

If you find any of this interesting, subscribe to this newsletter. I’ll send you an email every week with an interesting short read on a topic along with some links that you might find useful. See you next week.