I 100% struggle with this, and it makes me a slower developer. As I said elsewhere, the dirty data / control flow of two passes to do a one character substituti

I 100% struggle with this, and it makes me a slower developer. As I said elsewhere, the dirty data / control flow of two passes to do a one character substitution is as painful to me as synchronizing two copies of the same function for different character substitutions. Probably the biggest help is to work somewhere that it's a productive use of your time to care about the details. Second, getting the details right can steal time from getting broad strokes right. Who cares if you reduce a predictable branch if you are sitting on top of a massive bucketed hash table the serializes all keys to strings by allocating? Fight the battles worth winning. One of the things that helps is to work in a language with an execution model that I don't understand, e.g. Python or JavaScript.