Thing is, trying to create a perfect first version actually takes more time and mental energy than having a defined good base, creating a first draft and testin

Thing is, trying to create a perfect first version actually takes more time and mental energy than having a defined good base, creating a first draft and testing it. Here are some tips from personal experience: 1) Program with refactoring in mind beforehand. Things like SOLID, Hexagonal Architecture or even MVC help make refactoring easier. 2) Practice a bit with SOLID principles in your language. Once you get the gist the first time, every project after that is just copy and paste. Upload that base project to a personal git repository if you like. 3) If your project doesn't have to be lightning fast then prioritize legibility over superb efficient algorithms. For example, directly operating and mutating an array may demand less CPU cycles than mapping and parsing an array into controllers and descriptive functions. But unless you can wrap that in an accessible way, it will make further development hell. 4) Software engineering is weird. Unlike other engineering fields, our requirements and constraints change all the time, and the product is never meant to be static. The more flexible a program is to develop and refactor, the more it will maintain its quality over time. Even a perfect and fast program will crumble over time. The "I don't have time for good code" is a mental trap and a sign of either nearsightedness, or letting oneself be dragged by anxiety. It's our job to at least make notice when development is badly managed. Leaving that aside, I assure you that once you have a good boilerplate project, every program built on top of that will be fast and flexible. And any bugfixing will be straightforward.