It sounds to me like you've dug yourself into too much of a rut of how software should be made that you can't just dive into it anymore, and get bogged down in

It sounds to me like you've dug yourself into too much of a rut of how software should be made that you can't just dive into it anymore, and get bogged down in doing everything 'perfect' that you don't get anything done at all. I tend to just dive in, make a bit of a mess, and refactor/clean things up before I check things in. I think it helps that I have tackled learning quite a few different languages over the years and have done some working for startups (which has no time to get things right, it's just got to get done before the whole ship sinks). Just pick a little piece of what you want to work on, get that working, then add another bit, and another bit, until you have a full feature but still runs, then clean it up, check it in, and move on to the next tiny piece. Don't worry about documenting every little thing. Learning a new language, especially a scripting language that can get things done in a few lines of code and people don't obsess over diagrams and graphs of the system could help. Python filled that niche for me. Good luck!