> In particular, develop the ability to enforce encapsulation on your mental model of the program you are working on, so you don't need to keep the entire thing

> In particular, develop the ability to enforce encapsulation on your mental model of the program you are working on, so you don't need to keep the entire thing in your head all the time This one is hard, because the company will push you to make the model as complex as your brain can bear, and all of our programming tools are designed to support the most complex program the toolmaker could imagine. And on your resume you want to put the most complex set of capabilities that you could possibly put. And in your mind you want to be the most dangerous programmer you could possibly be. It took me 20 years to realize that there are ~0 problems that necessitate more than an intro-to-programming level of tooling. It took that long because the whole ecosystem around me pushed me away from transparent coding towards grandiose coding. Even now, I can rarely write simple code for hire because my coworkers have installed a veritable AGI of declarative tooling, and not using it is more conspicuous than using it. But I try. You are absolutely right plain (not fancy) code is the ultimate goal.