• Be Correct
  • if the code doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, nothing else matters
• Be Legible
  • if someone can’t look at it and verify what it’s doing, they can’t know that it’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do
• Be Performant
  • if it doesn’t perform well, its use will be limited
• Be Clever
  • make it interesting, that’s part of the fun

Bad programming practice:

• Working without understanding the problem
• Creating lots of duplicate code to handle similar functions
• Not following any coding standards or creating any sort of documentation
• Premature optimization
  • shining the hood ornament on a car without an engine
• Not understanding what performance means
  • what the underlying system is doing to perform the code that you’ve written