🎯 The Perfectionist
The Perfectionist strives for flawless code and never feels satisfied. This can slow progress and increase frustration. This person prepares and rehearses and redoes their work, continuously iterating in search of perfection. It can be hard to finish a task, because of that feeling in the back of your mind that this is not good enough.
I see this a lot with developers who care deeply about their craft. They'll spend hours refactoring code that already works, worrying about edge cases that may never happen, or rewriting comments five times to get the wording just right. While attention to detail is valuable, perfectionism can become paralyzing.
The truth is: your first version doesn't have to be your final version. Ship the working solution, gather feedback, then iterate. Real users will tell you what actually matters—and it's often different from what you imagined.
🏆 Embracing Imperfection
- Mistakes are part of learning - Each bug teaches you something new. I've learned more from broken code than perfect code
- Progress over perfection - Done is better than perfect. You can't improve what you haven't shipped
- Review and refactor, but don't obsess - Set time limits for improvements. Give yourself 20 minutes to polish, then move on
- Ship it! - Real-world feedback is more valuable than theoretical perfection. Users will tell you what really needs fixing
- Use version control - Git gives you permission to experiment. You can always roll back
- Set "good enough" criteria - Define what done looks like before you start, not while you're polishing
Think of GitHub Copilot as your "good enough" detector. When it suggests code that works but isn't perfect, sometimes that's exactly what you need. You can always refactor later when you have real data about what matters.
"Perfect is the enemy of good." - Voltaire