What are developer's blocks?

All these practices (documentation, tests, CI) are valuable, but sometimes they just mount up until you’re blocked.

Either you are new to the project and you just feel overwhelmed or you’ve been working on the project for a while, but you run out of stream and get stuck. it may be due to overwork or a lack of motivation.

How to unblock?

1. Take time with learning. Sometimes, the docs or tests need to be read to get an idea of the externals. Eventually looking at the source code and building up a mental model of how it fall fits together. "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance"
2. Realise when you're tired
3. Work incrementally: implement it with the minimum effort. Circle back round to improve the tests, docs, etc...
4. Write a prototype: Concern yourself only with the happy path. If you’re trying to learn about a dependency, it’s sometimes easier to write a quick prototype of using the dependency, possibly in an empty repository.
5. Start with draft documentation: avoid premature docs polishing. Capture why you did things a particular way. Provide basic usage instructions.
6. Release early, release often