Usually I come here to share rants/negativity but this time I wanna share an happy moment I had yesterday as a programmer.

In lots of instances I struggled to work on personal projects: I feel the desire to code cool stuff but I've often self-sabotaged myself by doing stuff like:

- self-enforcing "one man agile methodologies" with tasks, issue boards and lately time tracking
- forcing myself to do long study/research periods about the language/technologies I wanna use before writing the first line of code (and when I was able to actually end my research and get to code most of the stuff I researched was forgotten since cramming information is not effective on the long run)
- forcing myself to stick with all the "best practices" under the sun and to setup countless tools (linters, CI, unit testing...) before even getting a working POC

Usually all these stupid self imposed rules ended up in me procrastinating or pushing trough stuff struggling with headache after headache when coding actually used to feel a mostly fun pursuit to me.

Took lots of time to recognize this monster I created into my head but finally yesterday I did and I gave myself permission to:

- Start programming with just the very basics of the language (while reading a book on said language on the side at a relaxed pace, I can always come back later to improve my code as I learn more)
- Add stuff (unit testing, complex frameworks, CI/CD...) only when I need it
- Do a very basic planning (like a text files listing "must have" features and "nice to have features") and avoid issue boards and stuff, I'm working on a hobby project not on a company or a big OSS projects

It's been so long since the last time I had a programming session where I spent most time actually writing code and not researching and overthinking stuff and it felt great.