I definitely make mistakes, so one tactic I use is liberal use of code comments. I start with a comment about what the overall task is about, so that I can kee

I definitely make mistakes, so one tactic I use is liberal use of code comments. I start with a comment about what the overall task is about, so that I can keep perspective, and then I will use a series of "TODO ..." comments to break things down into smaller steps. The nice thing about this is, some of those survive revisions and can then be line comments which explain the next few lines of code: # Frob the Foo.womble, so that Bar gets its input # in the format it expects Similarly, I have grown to use commit messages longer than one line, even if I expect to later rebase it together with something else.