How to get myself into startup thinking mode?

Question

After spending a couple of years working in big tech, I have developed a habit of thinking it through. Hence, I think about software dev as just 20-30 percent of the solution, while worrying equally about CI/CD, testing, security, logging, operations and much more.I am now unable to develop something hacky/dirty prototype style stuff to see and experiment. Even bad indentation bothers me. I want to do weekend projects just for the fun of it but I can't. Is there a way to out here?

karmakaze · Accepted Answer

Be attached to the problem not the form of the solution. The user of your software doesn't care about any of those things they don't experience.
Recently I had to analyze some source code, trace 50-100 endpoints to mutating transactions, and document them in a concise format. I ended up making a utility to do this. It did exactly enough so I could copy+paste the results and no more. It was a hack that ran ripgrep twice over the same files and gave partially organized results that another program condensed into a who-calls tree and finally turned upside-down to be caller-callee tree for copy-paste.
Have exact use cases. Know what your user wants to do and why. Know all the things that don't matter to them and steer away from those.
The other things you speak of is Craft (or at its worst golf). I enjoy the exercises but don't fool yourself into thinking this is getting you anywhere close to a product.