[ZephyrBlu]

I don't understand this perspective. Everyone only has so many hours in a day, and there's only so fast you can work.

If he's writing esbuild that is taking time away from being the CTO of Figma. Either he's working a shit ton, one of the things (Esbuild or Figma) is being somewhat neglected, or his output is actually not as high as it looks.

[zeroxfe]

As someone that ran a company while working on side open source projects, don't underestimate the therapeutic value of writing code. (As a CEO, my job had almost no coding, and working on my opensource projects made me happy, and restored a lot of my energy.)

[betageek]

CTO and lead developer on a focused project are very different jobs - my guess would be he relaxes from the very strategy and soft-skill heavy day job by diving into a challenging problem that keeps his dev chops up and lets him focus on a finite problem.

[ZephyrBlu]

So working a shit ton then.

[kyawzazaw]

No idea on Evan Wallace's perspective but there is a possibility that it isn't seen as work. It would like be me solving sudoku or some of my friends building LEGOs or solving extremely hard jigzaw puzzles

[ZephyrBlu]

I understand that because it's often how I feel when I'm doing programming work. However, I would still consider that time spent working.

[atonse]

To echo what others have said here, my role as CTO and now CEO has gone from 95% coding to about 5% these days. So some nights I code on ideas and things that have been swirling in my head, just because it’s nice to just quietly write code and solve a finite (but possibly difficult) problem without interruptions. It actually IS therapeutic.

[xal]

Same

[pixelrevision]

The tool is likely helping Figma pretty directly by cutting developer build times.

[zerocount]

Maybe there's not much to do as the CTO of Figma. Throwing time into Esbuild doesn't mean he's neglecting his CTO duties.

[ZephyrBlu]

In which case my last option would be relevant:

> or his output is actually not as high as it looks

[fvdessen]

Frankly most of us would not be able to create esbuild even with all the time in the world.