Stop caring. Make something messy and shitty. Tell yourself you are going to make something messy and shitty; gleefully ignore any "best practices" that make it a pain in the ass to just slap something together.
Don't worry about a name or a domain or a hosting or whatever. Just slap it together in the stupidest way you can. You wanna make a game? Build the gameplay with colored blocks moving around in some crappy toy game-making app. You wanna make a web app? Shit something out in PHP.
If your utterly shitty implementation of the idea feels like something worth pushing further, then you can start investing in Doing It Right.
This goes for any field, by the way. Obsessing too much about a painting? Grab a crayon or a highlighter or whatever and some cheap paper and make a few messes until you have something that actually works, even in its shittiness of execution. Making music? Just plop down a few chord progressions or some little doodles of melody or rhythm, until something has that spark. Writing a story? Scribble down the barest outline of the plot and ask yourself how many cliches you can count, sit down with a bottle of wine and a notebook and a list of interview questions to pick from to ask that character who's sitting in the back of your head and won't go away.
Whatever you want to make, make the crappiest version of it you can, and then start refining it.
And if all of your ideas are too good to sully with this, don't sit there. Put them in a notebook, and come up with some throwaway ideas that you're perfectly fine with doing shitty versions of; this will hone your skills, and eventually you can look at that one shining, amazing idea that still seems like a good idea twenty years later and decide that it's time to have a go at it.
There was a short talk by Andrew Tridgell (one of the creators of Samba) about having a "junk code" directory. I'm not sure if there's a video but https://www.samba.org/ftp/tridge/talks/junkcode.pdf gives you a reasonable idea.
The value is that you can eventually give yourself a break and just write goddamn code. I have terrible terrible code in https://github.com/voltagex/junkcode but it's fine because if anything there really grabs me I'll graduate it out into its own repo.
This is really good advice. This is what I get out of hackathons. It doesn't matter whether it's clean, if you want to win, all that matters is that it works. You'll do whatever needs to be done to get there, rather than resting on some set of ideals. I just haven't quite figured out how to create the sense of urgency in my side projects.
I'm not sure urgency is always what you need for a personal project. I've been working on a graphic novel[1] for four years; there are some days where I get several hours in, there are other days where I only manage a half hour. Even if I only get a half hour's work in, at least it's a half hour closer to the end than it was when I got up that morning. Past a certain point, what matters is not that you burnt the midnight oil; what matters is that you got it done and that the end product is a full expression of your vision.
(I mean, if you've got a deadline with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ad buys and manufacturing lined up for it, sure, you end up crunching to meet that deadline. But if it's just for you? Screw deadlines. Just keep working on it; it's Done when it's Done.)
Don't worry about a name or a domain or a hosting or whatever. Just slap it together in the stupidest way you can. You wanna make a game? Build the gameplay with colored blocks moving around in some crappy toy game-making app. You wanna make a web app? Shit something out in PHP.
If your utterly shitty implementation of the idea feels like something worth pushing further, then you can start investing in Doing It Right.
This goes for any field, by the way. Obsessing too much about a painting? Grab a crayon or a highlighter or whatever and some cheap paper and make a few messes until you have something that actually works, even in its shittiness of execution. Making music? Just plop down a few chord progressions or some little doodles of melody or rhythm, until something has that spark. Writing a story? Scribble down the barest outline of the plot and ask yourself how many cliches you can count, sit down with a bottle of wine and a notebook and a list of interview questions to pick from to ask that character who's sitting in the back of your head and won't go away.
Whatever you want to make, make the crappiest version of it you can, and then start refining it.
And if all of your ideas are too good to sully with this, don't sit there. Put them in a notebook, and come up with some throwaway ideas that you're perfectly fine with doing shitty versions of; this will hone your skills, and eventually you can look at that one shining, amazing idea that still seems like a good idea twenty years later and decide that it's time to have a go at it.