Sketches

One of the things I like to do in my free time is to dabble, in the most unschooled fashion imaginable, in music composition. Composing is hard. About as hard (and remarkably similar to) programming. Arnold Schoenberg offers this "advice for self-criticism" to students of composition:

6. MAKE MANY SKETCHES
Join the best sketches to produce others and improve them until the result is satisfactory.

To make sketches is a humble and unpretentious approach toward perfection.

—Fundamentals of Musical Composition, Ch XII

I think that this applies equally well to programming.