> I wrote this article to lament the loss of the curious spark in our developer culture

The curiosity hasn't disappeared from the culture, but it might not be brought in to a workplace anymore.

I think a lot of us have stopped bringing the tinkerer itch to work.

Outside of the workplace, there's an entire parade of tinkering by folks who at best post it on Youtube, not here (I watch "Stuff Made Here" for the code).

Of all the events of the past decade, the worst hit to the tinkering visibility has been Github making personal repos private by default.

Mostly the folks who were like me still have pet projects, most of them will share their code but only if you ask because it is "Well, not as nice as it should be".

I've got hundreds of repos in my github, but there's a sharp fall-off in what's public (there's ~113 public and 180 private) right when that happened and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The tinkering is more active than ever now with vibe coding tools, where I can draw an svg out and then ask it to "I want to use manim.py to animate this" to get something which is a neat presentation tool to describe how data moves between systems.

But is it worth showing you when all the fun there was in making?

What if all I am likely to get "So what?" as the only response. Wouldn't that it make it less fun?