Just Make It

Nike's infamous slogan extolls us to "Just Do It".

Don't over think it.

Take action.

Just Do It.

In Karl Zylinski's great blog post about the Odin Programming Language, he writes:

By the way, I discourage anyone who is making their own video game from making an ECS. It’s usually not a good idea. Perhaps it’s a good idea for some massive game engines. But for a small project it might just make your code harder to write and thereby your game worse. I feel like people who write an ECS before starting on their gameplay code are people who actually don’t want to make games: They want to make general purpose game engines. That’s fine, but make sure you’re not lying to yourself about what it is you want to do. If you want to make a game, then just make a game. Write the code that you need for the problem at hand, don’t pretend to be a giant game engine company.

Make the thing you want to make. (A game).

Don't make something to make the thing and other things like it. (A game engine).

In software engineering it's drilled into you to seek out abstractions and to build reusable things. This can lead to a tendency to overthink and over engineer things: to want to build elegant, generalized solutions.

Instead of building something that might be relatively boring (and easier) to build in comparison: the thing itself.

So:

Don't over-engineer it.

Focus on the actual problem.

Just Make It.