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Comment by yeswecatan | Hacker News Reader

I love coding on my own projects. When it comes to work, I get so incredibly anxious about not being able to deliver a good solution. I obsess over every detail fearing I'll make the wrong choice ("this _could_ be a foreign key but should it be?" "Redis or postgres for this very crucial counter data") that most joy is completely stripped away.

I admire and envy those who can hear unclear requirements and get excited about needing to solve a problem.

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Getting past the "fear of getting it wrong" is a powerful skill. Learning that it's actually easier to fix a mistake than to get something right first time is the first step to developing that skill.

This is so true! When starting work on a new project or feature I nowadays actively try to embrace ugly solutions. Refactoring after you have a working solution is much easier than coming up with a perfect solution (which probably doesn't exist).

And when you get your ugly solution going, you can show it to somebody else and help them understand the domain and get feedback.

It's a lot easier for somebody to understand and then critique when you've got something concrete to demonstrate

I feel the same way. I love obssessing over small details. In professional programming there's no time for that, people just want results and profits as soon as possible and the technology is just the means to that end instead of something that's inherently good. I chose not to pursue a career in professional programming because of this.

Two things I find help reduce the fear of making a wrong choice (architects have this particularly bad, btw):

* Make the decision for just the next step, and try it out. The faster the feedback loop the better. * Work as a team. The better the collaboration and support, the more effective the team. Good teams care about psychological safety and about the outcomes - there's no contradiction there.

Try to keep your code and architecture malleable (and documented) instead of optimizing everything upfront. Once you discover bottlenecks, you can actually spend time improving things.

I usually just don't do foreign keys, makes the queries insanely fast :D

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