I'm a great believer in "Build one to Throw Away".<p>When you start to build something you go through a huge learning curve. So much that, by the time you finish, you know dozens or even hundreds of design decisions that were poor decisions which you have made along the way. You have even learned lots of things that you didn't even know at the beginning of your task.<p>So throw that first one away. Use your new-found knowledge to build that thing again, but far more efficiently and far more easily this time.<p>Truth to tell, by the time you have completed your task again, you will have learned even more and have found even more of the previous poor design decisions along the way.<p><i>So throw that second one away too.</i> And hopefully, on your third attempt you have learned so much that this third thing is actually usable.<p>It once used to be said that Microsoft didn't get things right till Version 3 was released. There's a lot to be said for that.