Two unfashionable lessons that I learned when I was a practicing programmer rather than a hobbyist and loathsome manager. 1. Code is a communication system : b

Two unfashionable lessons that I learned when I was a practicing programmer rather than a hobbyist and loathsome manager. 1. Code is a communication system : between you and the next person to touch it. You are telling the other person how you made this work. Invest in this because the next person will probably be you in six months. 2. Compilers and type systems are your friends. Write code that extracts errors from the compiler by explicitly constraining things as much as you can afford to do. Avoiding typing or checking via long methods or low level datatypes is bad. Short typed, functional methods and high level data types are good.