How Making a Fountain Pen Made Me a Better Developer

Any type of process can benefit from task optimisation (reducing cost, improving consistency, and...

Any type of process can benefit from task optimisation (reducing cost, improving consistency, and making progress easier to repeat).

I recently started making fountain pens as a personal side project. What surprised me is how much of the mindset I use in software development applies to a completely different craft.

I’ve found myself using many of the same principles:

• Building a roadmap: woodturning → lathe accreditation → design in Autodesk → material/component research
• Thinking in product design terms: fail fast, fail cheaply, and keep the design malleable
• Learning the vocabulary: pen parts, machinery, tools, materials
• Breaking things down into small atomic components
• Designing with replaceable parts and modularity in mind
• Setting milestones and celebrating small wins to stay motivated
• Documenting repeatable processes to improve consistency
• Defining “done” at both task and project level
• Knowing when to defer features, my first pen did not have a clip, but a future iteration will
• Keeping plans flexible for as long as possible, because they will change

I'm still developing my SaaS project, but this side quest has reinforced how transferable these skills really are.

It reminded me that good process design is not just about software. It's about learning, iterating, reducing friction, and building things better over time and celebrating the small wins to maintain motivation.

Most importanty, being able to see your skills applied in a tangible project emphasises the importants of those rules. You learn WHY the rules exist so that you're not following them blindly. You learn how to adapt when things aren't going to plan. I would encourage you the reader, do not put all your eggs into one basket.

As you can see, things didn't entirely go to plan, I swapped out the grip section material but I will likely go back and fix this reusing black section on another pen (benefits of modularty).

Learn something new and apply those lessons to what you already know.