Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code

The effort of walking an imaginary someone through your problem, step by step and in some detail, is what will often lead you to your answer. But if you aren’t willing to put the effort into fully explaining the problem and how you’ve attacked it, you can’t reap the benefits of thinking deeply about your own problem before you ask others to.

Sometimes, the documentation isn’t complete. Sometimes, it’s wrong. The source code never lies.

No matter what the documentation says, the source code is the ultimate truth, the best and most definitive and up-to-date documentation you’re likely to find.

Writing good, meaningful comments is hard. It’s as much an art as writing the code itself; maybe even more so. As Sammy Larbi said in Common Excuses Used To Comment Code, if your feel your code is too complex to understand without comments, your code is probably just bad. Rewrite it until it doesn’t need comments any more. If, at the end of that effort, you still feel comments are necessary, then by all means, add comments. Carefully.

to write good comments you have to be a good writer

we need the comments to tell us why it works.

You should always write your code as if comments didn’t exist.

It is possible that a bug exists in the OS, the compiler, or a third-party product– but this should not be your first thought. It is much more likely that the bug exists in the application code under development.

Even adding a single project to your workload is profoundly debilitating by Weinberg’s calculation. You lose 20 percent of your time. By the time you add a third project to the mix, nearly half your time is wasted in task switching.
This can be a problem even if you’re only working on a single project at any time. The impact of simply letting your email, phone and instant messaging interrupt what you’re doing can be profound, as documented in this BBC study

Of course, too much saw sharpening, or random, aimless saw sharpening, can become another form of procrastination. But a developer who seems completely disinterested in it at all is a huge red flag. As Peter Bregman explains, obsession can be a good thing:
People are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them.Obsessions are one of the greatest telltale signs of success. Understand a person’s obsessions and you will understand her natural motivation. The thing for which she would walk to the end of the earth.