Exactly. Hell, I consider tooling to be some of the most fun (and often difficult) things I work on in my free time.

If I can make something easier for my normal dev environment I see huge gains ~40 hours a week. That's pretty damn awesome and flashy to me. It's definitely not easy, but imo it's well worth my time.

I'd say tooling is so much fun it derails most of my pet projects. This is why there are 500 different static site generators produced a week.

I agree that tooling can be fun. What probably many more people would agree is non-fun is good documentation.

I actually prefer to write dev tools. Implementing my product manager next feature will always be less satisfying than helping a co-worker.