justin sautter

Stop overthinking everything

Feb 19th, 2025

I see this all the time with new programers, but especially myself - because well, I am one. I think that the very nature of computer science and programming in general, which is very drilled down, tedious, and detail oriented - a microcosm of sorts - lends itself to getting lost in the barrage of details and data points pretty quickly.

What’s the best algorithm to implement here? What’s the big O runtime of it? Does it allow backtracking or recursion? Does it alter the contents of memory in place? What if I want to change this later? Is it readable? How many microseconds can I save if I rewrite it in Rust?

Do we even need to be doing this?

Please stop it. Stop overthinking everything.

Sometimes it is important to take a step back, zoom out, and ask some fundamental questions every time you are trying to accomplish something.

What is the goal here? Do we need to be doing this? What’s the simplest way of accomplishing this? Can it be improved? Repeat

What else does this do?

Doing this continually can zap us of our confidence and create a sense of fear with everything that we attempt to do. It’s indicative of perfectionism. Everything we do must be perfect at the expense of making any mistakes at all. But remember this is not conducive to growth, quite the opposite. Especially when you are starting out with anything new, you are going to make mistakes. A lot of them. As much as the sky is blue, the Earth is round, we will all die, and you will pay taxes (maybe not that last one), you will also make mistakes.

Don’t sacrifice your ability to learn because you need to be the very best (that ever was).

This is probably a terrible blog post! And that’s alright.

Go make some mistakes.

Stop Overthinking Programming - bigboxSWE

The Worst Developer Mentality - NeetCode

Don’t Overthink It - Jason Horsley