Most of these lists do not advise on "programming" the task but rather "programming" the job/position. There's no problem with that, I'd just wish it was labell

Most of these lists do not advise on "programming" the task but rather "programming" the job/position. There's no problem with that, I'd just wish it was labelled "software engineering advice" or "advice for programmers". Few of the points are about programming itself and the list is overall pretty good. Consider this just a rant from an older programmer who hasn't fully recognized that 'programming' is now largely a social endeavor with online info for everything, language and library ecosystems, etc. I wonder how much of this information I would have internalized if it were all available in my time. Seems like the kind of thing I might read and nod in agreement and forget to apply when relevant without some hard earned run-ins (which is how I'd picked them up). As for actual programming advice, the thing I'd highlight is to look at the data first and foremost. It goes from initial conditions to post conditions. The differences are what your program/function does, but both the pre/post conditions should be able to be fully described as a valid static state. Once you understand that, the problem, the code is largely plumbing with a small part that applies the functional transformation. There's so much focus on the form and style of "the code" that seems to consider it the main thing rather than an artifact of getting the main thing done: think any time there seems to be fancy abstractions that don't provide value to offset its complexity. To relate it to a point in the post, if you can't connect the difficulty you're having with the logical transformation that needs to be done (e.g. from database state to state), it's likely self-inflicted (or it could be due to a poor choice of database schema). Similarly for poor choices of request/response formats--basically bad plumbing between systems (and not intrinsically hard because of the information being handled).