There are too many shiny objects and it is killing me

I have a set of guidelines for myself to keep me from going off into a never-never land of getting nothing done, because I love new gadgets, new software, new tools, etc. They aren't rules, because sometimes the right way to solve a problem is to use something new, but they do help me avoid a lot of pointless wheel-spinning.

Some of those guidelines:

Editing text is a solved problem, emacs or vim, pick one and get back to work. I picked vim 20 years ago, and have mostly stuck with it. I can imagine someone else might have other editor options in the list of things that solve the editing text problem. I go outside of this guideline when poking at Android development, because all of the current docs and tutorials assume I'm using Android Studio and the friction is so much lower when using those tools. At other times I've used other tools. jEdit, Eclipse, OpenOffice, when they were the right tool. But, I always come back to vim for editing text, and it's always what I try first before trying to find the optimal tool...only if vim makes something hard do I branch out.

Linux distributions aren't all that different. Pick one, and get back to work. I picked Fedora 20 years ago (when it was called Red Hat Linux), and have stuck with it. CentOS/RHEL/Scientific Linux goes on my servers, because it's just like Fedora, except stable and reasonably secure for up to a decade after release. Other options are reasonable, but there is no reason for me to switch. I have to know the server-side of every distro my software supports (and FreeBSD), but I don't need to know the desktop minutiae of every distro, so I ignore it completely.

Avoid relying on proprietary tools, particularly those that require a lot of learning to use. This one is more subtle. Maybe the best tool for the job is a proprietary piece of software or a web service...but, it's difficult to have faith that it will be around in five or ten years. So, if there is a slightly worse Open Source option, I will choose that option, because I am less likely to have to learn it again or re-develop my ancillary tools to work with it. I happily pay for good software...but, I don't happily pay (in time or money) for a forced upgrade/migration cycle.

There are lots of others that are less relevant for this context; experience can make some kinds of decisions quicker to make. Though, I guess it can also put blinders on making it harder to see new and better ways to do things. It's probably worth revisiting these decisions every five or ten years to be sure the landscape hasn't changed dramatically.

This is really good advice. This is what I get out of hackathons. It doesn't matter whether it's clean, if you want to win, all that matters is that it works. You'll do whatever needs to be done to get there, rather than resting on some set of ideals. I just haven't quite figured out how to create the sense of urgency in my side projects.

That's my favorite part of that translation of the Tao Te Ching, too.

Additionally I find value in this rant from Erik Naggum: http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3141310154691952@naggum....

    like,
    if you aren't using today's fad language in the very latest version of
    the IDE, you'll be left behind.  aaaugh!  but it's good that some people
    run like they are scared out of their wits.  if they suddenly disappear
    over the edge of a cliff, a good number of people will notice in time and
    _not_ follow them.  those are the ones that matter.

    you can scare most people most of the time, but you can't scare all of
    the people all of the time -- some will always use Common Lisp.

The problem I face with accepting imperfection in general is twofold: 1) while I may not ever reach perfection, it's still a goal, because I find that I have flaws, and I can (and sometimes do) fix them, and life is better (plus after fixing I may then see new flaws to fix that I couldn't see before) and 2) when I'm forced to use a very imperfect tool for [business reason], when I know about this more perfect (not necessarily more shiny) tool over here but can't use because of [business reason]. In the second case, there are two states that are happier: actively using the better tool, or not knowing about the better tool in the first place. When you already know about the better tool, and can't soon get to the point of using it actively, the transition period can be demoralizing sometimes.

About 50% of my projects die in the following way:

1) I've got an idea for a useful library that might finally make my GitHub not look so lame!

2) Search github: (idea) language:(language)

3) Oh, there's the exact thing I was going to build. Never mind.

Another 49% die this way:

1) It'd be so cool to have X!

2) (thinks about time to actually develop X versus real value it would give me and likelihood of anyone paying me for it to make up the difference)

3) Oh man, screw that, it's not even worth 1/100 that amount of effort.

I'm terrible at generating projects for "itch scratching" reasons because I cost/benefit them to death first, or I think of them 6 months after someone else already had the idea :-/

[EDIT] cleanup

Wow, you've just described my current state of being. I literally froze up mentally last weekend because I had too many things on my mind. Things related to learning/projects/ideas. I kept jumping between them, like a processor performs context switching, but a lot less successfully. It was like bouncing a ball between two walls, and slowly making the gap smaller. The ball's bounces increase exponentially until it cannot anymore. It's at this point you've crashed.