I recall not being very effective with C++ for years, and then someone recommended the book Large Scale C++ Software Design, and that was a big unlock. I didn’

I recall not being very effective with C++ for years, and then someone recommended the book Large Scale C++ Software Design, and that was a big unlock. I didn’t use 80% of what’s in the book, but just having a comprehensive way of structuring the code was a massive productivity boost. Looking back, I suspect it was less that it was “the right way”, but just that it was “a way” and most of the benefit was it kept me from overthinking and got me to work. Later with C++11, I kept having this thought, “in Python this would be way less verbose”, and I started writing C++ that looked more like Python, creating whatever helper functions Python would have (mostly simple stuff, string handling, etc). That was one of the most productive seasons of programming I ever had, and I still get tempted to write stuff in C++ that Python is better suited for, just because the benefit of not overthinking is that significant (at least for me).