So far I've been sticking to a handful of personal preferences and tried to adhere to set standards depending on which programming language I'm using. The problem is, the number of languages I'm interested in has increased as well as my interest in open source. I'm finding myself unable to set and adhere to guidelines anymore just because I can't keep them in my head and with the rise of github it became clear that some of my personal preferences are the complete opposite of what is popular. Add errors (like YAML not working with tabs) and clashing rules (people like to use tabs and align with spaces in C++ which blows up in Python) and I end up fighting more against those rules than actually writing code.

How do programmers cope? Doing your own thing and then converting a large codebase if it goes on github doesn't really seem to work. I've been converting tabs to spaces for example in all my projects where I only have a private repository and can rewrite the history.

I'm thinking about creating guidelines I strictly adhere to while at the same time using features and settings which are the most common among people writing code (like using spaces instead of tabs). But for some languages that seems like a pretty though thing to do. Also I might be overthinking things. But there is a part in me that tries to resist because I'm giving up something I prefer. I have my editor and linters set up the way I like it, but there is a limit to what is possible and configuring them is a challenge by itself.