The things listed are all nice and all, but here's what I've seen result in dramatically better programming: Know your problem domain. There are, in basically e

The things listed are all nice and all, but here's what I've seen result in dramatically better programming: Know your problem domain. There are, in basically every field of programming, some very domain-specific problems which you need to know about, that will be much more important in whether or not you do good programming than any of the things listed here. If you're handling money with your software, you need to know about different things than if you're not. If you're making front ends in government or legal domains, there are huge implications that will impact very low level technological choices. For example, are you allowed to do a DELETE? Or do accounting or legal requirements mean that you have to make a new row, which is the correction to the original row? If you don't know that about your problem domain, it doesn't matter how good you know your language, debugger, etc. Just one example, and every problem domain has them. Know about your problem domain. It has a dramatically bigger impact on your programming than any of the things listed in this article.