I was going to post that on my personal projects I'm intentionally fast and loose with git and then saw your post which sums up my thoughts. With personal proj

I was going to post that on my personal projects I'm intentionally fast and loose with git and then saw your post which sums up my thoughts. With personal projects, the most important thing to maintain is interest and momentum. Best practices aren't so useful if you end up hating working on your project because of self-inflicted process. Certainly, if you are using your project to improve best practices or learn "correct" ways of doing things for some other long-term career benefit, go for it. What I've learned, however, is that personal projects where I've spent more time doing "meta-work" were the ones where I never shipped anything or just spun my wheels feeling proud of the form of the project. The projects where I just threw caution to the wind and cut corners strategically (not everywhere, mind you) were the ones where I ended up shipping something.