On the side I'm building a communication app myself and I've started over a few times now. I made some mistakes in early development that caused starting over t

On the side I'm building a communication app myself and I've started over a few times now. I made some mistakes in early development that caused starting over to be the best choice (I'm not a perennial start-over guy, things weren't very far along when I restarted, this is just a side thing). Mistakes: I did plenty of backend work (e.g. gRPC services) just to realize it didn't mesh well with the frontend when I started to build it. I over-complicated the feature set and realized I built a foundation for an MVP that would take forever. I abstracted everything because in my head I thought about all the future uses. I worked on an advanced-tech frontend that kept me bogged down in frontend development instead of doing the whole thing. All of these are typical mistakes of pie-in-the-sky side projects sans deadlines. For the latest iteration I have changed my approach. I am building the dumbest web UI w/ the dumbest in-memory-only-at-first backend with minimal abstractions. The initial web UI doesn't even use any JS which I know can seem like extra work w/ HTML forms and the like, but the raw simplicity is easier to build now and take away later than something more complex. I'm deferring lots of features. Once I reach a web-UI-only MVP, my next step will be to abstract what already isn't on the UI front and make a Qt app that uses the same abstraction. I've found this to be the easiest way to get some UI idea reuse across different paradigms. I can add more UIs including an API, terminal, mobile, etc with this approach. For the backend, simple gRPC backed by a "db" of in-memory data structures for now until I abstract that to allow sqlite to join and then on from there. It is very refreshing to develop a full-stack app without a complex full stack. The major benefit of developing a stupid-web-with-in-memory-db MVP? Testing and quick iteration. I've found you can iterate on core structures/ideas or you can iterate on external tech/features, but you can't do both at the same time.