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• Everything here is my very personal writing and does not reflect the opinions of current or past employers, nor does it stem from confidential information obtained there.

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Good software programming practices

• Continuous releases and daily builds
• Rather than put a bug in the bug database, first try to fix it. Don't code first and ask QA to find bugs.
• The engineer who wrote the code is mostly responsible for QA.
• No code is finished until the unit test is finished.
• Good design results from getting something going quickly, followed by lots of quick iteration.
• The best architectures evolve for a long time.
• Code reviews are a regular part of development.
• Difficult parts of code are best done by a team of two people working closely together.
• If you see a new bug while doing something else, drop everything and jump on the chance to fix it. It just make your life easier down the road.
• It is possible to eliminate all bugs from many subsystems and you should use techniques that make it possible, like monte carlo simulations and exhaustive checking code whenever possible.
• Complexity is your enemy -- the sooner you learn the smell of too much complexity, the better.
• Simplicity is your friend. Don't fall for a really cool fancy algorithm unless you know you need it.
• Buzzword technologies often become religious. The only thing you should be religious about is happy customers and they don't care about buzzwords.
• Don't build elaborate systems unless you know you need them.
• Research existing open source project to make sure the code you need isn't already available.
• Never write a slow program.
• By the time your project is finished your competitor's project will be way better than you think.
• Price is only one feature of software. It's often not the most important. From the user's perspective, simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
• Automate releases.
• Use source level debuggers.
• Use IDEs
• Don't write makefiles unless you have too.
• Measure then optimize.
• Always spend at least 10% of your time learning new things.
• Use multiple languages, programming environments, operating systems and programming methodologies until you are comfortable with them and learn to appreciate the benefits of different approaches.
• Use the best tools, even if they are expensive.
• Optimize variable names for maximum clarity, not minimum typing.
• It's OK to make mistakes. The only thing that isn't OK is to not learn from them.
• Don't leave code commented out unless it's clearly explained.
• Approach each piece of code you write like it's final finished code. Don't leave loose ends to clean up later because you'll never have time to clean them up.
• Never code an algorithm that you know won't work in the final product either because it won't scale, run fast enough, or will have a rare failure case.
• All successful products have a life longer than you can conceive. Files and processors will grow by factors of 10,000 -- make sure your design can accommodate change.
• Don't code the first algorithm that comes to mind. Try to examine all possible approaches and choose the best. Get someone to review your approach before coding.
• Don't put band aids on bad code, rewrite it. At first is seems hard, but after you've done it awhile you'll find successive rewrites go much faster than you thought.
• When you work on someone else's code, don't leave it in worse shape than it came to you. Ask the original author to review your change.
• No bug is impossible to fix.
• Get to be good friends with a programmer, designer, or writer who's better than you.