Coding Principles Every Engineer Should Know

The author presents a set of personal engineering principles learned across his career. They focus on skepticism, simplicity, long-term thinking, and taking responsibility for the code you write and operate.

Reading notes

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• Be paranoid: do not trust systems, fixes, or your own understanding without checking them more than once.
• Do not lie to the computer: avoid leaky abstractions, undocumented side effects, and uses the system was not meant to support.
• Keep it simple: solve only what needs to be solved, because code is maintained much longer than it is created.
• Do not optimize too early: most optimization is never used, and it makes designs more complicated.
• When fixing a bug, try to remove the conditions that could let it happen again.
• Question assumptions constantly and ask what problem is really being solved.
• Think long term: rushed code and local shortcuts can slow future work.
• Care about your code and write it so it is readable and well designed.
• Accept the trade-off of cheap, fast, and right, and be clear about which compromise you are making.
• Stay curious and keep learning new things throughout your engineering career.