“Death of an Idealist”

My brother’s recent post, “Death of an Idealist“, got me thinking about how perfectionism is often more of a hindrance than a help.

Perfectionism is a major block for me, and it was highlighted this weekend whilst I was working on my current project. I’ve been stuck in “Analysis Paralysis” for a few weeks, because there’s always that feeling that it “has to be perfect”. I decided to write some code, but as part of a “sandbox” so that I could tweak things and then copy the code to the main project when it was ready. Almost immediately I felt a boost, and wrote some pretty good non-perfect code.

Writing software is difficult, and it’s not made any easier when you are afraid of “getting it wrong”. Just giving myself the safety of a “sandbox” removed this barrier, and made programming a lot more fun than it has been for a while.