At the end of the day, we write code not for its own sake, but to solve problems in real life. After realizing this I abandoned several pet projects that were b

At the end of the day, we write code not for its own sake, but to solve problems in real life. After realizing this I abandoned several pet projects that were basically going nowhere and only taking up time--they were not designed to solve a problem. Also if you don't start something the right way, it is quite difficult to fix it. I spend more time now thinking about appropriate data structures, project layouts, etc. before I jump in.