Year ago, I read a book on time management (or procrastination) called “Eat That Frog!”.
In the book the author, Brian Tracy, proposes that you should always tackle the most challenging task on your To Do list first.
Now I have not applied that principle in my life, but I have certainly applied it in my programming.
The first thing you should tackle when writing a program is always the part about which you are most unsure, or the part which the most risky.
It’s amazing how often I have asked a programmer “how did you get on with X” and they reply that they haven’t got to it yet because they decided to start with Y. And Y is often something which involves no risk at all (like settings, configuration, admin screens, or even a splash screen!)
Example
When I was working on the COVID program recently, I started with the things with which I was least familiar: the HTTP Client class first and then the JSON library. Once I got these working, then I knew that everything else would fall into place quite easily.
Conclusion
When you start a new program, always start with the piece which scares you most. Don’t waste days doing the easy stuff before discovering that there really is a problem with that scary piece.