for the life of me I cannot figure out in my mind how to structure this project I want to start, and jumping right into coding does not improve this mental block.

At work this Golang code base has a clean architecture, so easy to maintain and extend, and I'm unable to replicate it on my own project(s). It sucks to be an ignorant.

... unable to replicate.

Try, try, again.

Clean architecture is a theoretical concept.

Applying in reality is hard, sometimes impossible, sometimes not worth the effort.

Don't think about what is wrong, create a got branch, try to change what's annoying you and find out along the way if it's a good idea or a bad idea.

Experience comes seldomly from staring at written text - more from trying and realizing why it succeeded or failed.

My 2 cents is to star making something functional.

Later, I refactor some things.

To start, I try to put on paper the big blocks (classes) so that I get started. You can always narrow stuff down.

It is also possible that I make different versions because one does not work.