[spelunker]

When doing personal projects I have to constantly be reeling myself back in from doing x thing "The Right Way", because I end up doing a bunch of useless crap and not actually making progress on the personal project.

Easy to fall into that trap when 1) it's just you and 2) there is little accountability because it's just you!

[bob1029]

My tactic for pushing back against this is to try to trick myself into doing the simplest thing that might still work. It's a challenge to write "bad" code on purpose. The opposite of chasing perfect/clean.

I have found that this frees up a lot of weird expectations that you place yourself under. You can get much more creative when everything is a dumb-ass-simple public static member vs when you are spending 2 hours a day fighting a cursed IoC/DI abstraction simply because you are worried that clean code Jesus might be watching you.

It helps to have an end goal too. It's really easy for me to push through a messy prototype when I can see it bringing me closer to a strategic objective.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Bingo. First get it working, then get it right, then get it fast. It's for this reason that almost all of my projects start with a SQLite database - it's a program I'm very familiar with, like an old reliable chef's knife.