(1) There are no magic bullets. (2) End of list. But seriously, "10x" aside, there are some techniques that have come up surprisingly often and been surprisin

(1) There are no magic bullets. (2) End of list. But seriously, "10x" aside, there are some techniques that have come up surprisingly often and been surprisingly effective during my career. A lot of them are around caching, cache coherency, memoization, etc. and I see many of those have already been mentioned. How to write a simple parser is another one, likewise. The one I haven't seen mentioned (and don't expect to) is "poisoning" of data or requests. Sometimes it's not very convenient to delete a piece of data or turn a request around with an error at the very moment when the need for that is detected - often because of locking or reentrancy issues. Just marking something as invalid, until some time when removal is more convenient, can be a very powerful technique. It can also make monitoring such events easier. I've brought this idea into a codebase at least a dozen times, and more often than not it has gotten a "wow, that makes things so much easier" reaction. I can't take credit, of course. Like many things around caching or state machines, I got it from the hardware folks where it's a standard technique. In general, software folks can learn a lot from looking at how hardware folks have solved similar problems in an even more challenging environment, and "bring back" those solutions to their own domain.