Looking for more guidance on perfboard assembly? Take a look at this project that shows a deep dive into building a logic circuit on perfboard. Yes, looking at the solder joints, there’s lots of imperfection, and finally when it comes to breaking out the final I/O connectors to your embedded computer, you have a “beanstalk” of vertical wires sprouting up in random places. However, unlike on my project, this developer did not use crimp-on connectors to provide a more clean break-out of the available signals. Oh, and yes, the developer also used a whole bunch of white wires rather than using colored wires throughout the entire assembly, though there were some colored wires. And, yes, when wires needed to be routed back to the perfboard, overlong wires were indeed used to make grabbing easier.
20200727/https://medium.com/@rxseger/building-a-4-bit-shift-register-from-7400-nand-gates-for-gpio-output-port-expansion-on-a-raspberry-5d6cee8a1291