Technical stuff Requirements are like water. They're easier to build on when they're frozen.

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Gerald Weinberg

Copy and paste is a design error.

David Parnas
 

Think about how you develop your own code.

Do you rush into writing a piece of code and use comments later, if you have any time left? Or do you use a pseudocode approach by writing comments n the first place and then developing functionality to implement that?

Do you develop code in such a way that it can be later tested and mainained? Or do you write it, prove “it works” and think about it next time you have to adjust functionality?

Do you favor speed for maintainability?

These are the lessons one learns while reading Code Complete, a book which aims to learn you how to do stuff right, not “just do it”. I like it more and more while I’m reading it. Most of the examples present common-sense development, yet I’ve seen so much poor code which does the job that I would like to reccommend it to all software developers. If you do read it, I can only promise it’ll make you a better colleague than you already might be.