In a quick new post today Kevin Schroeder asks his readers for feedback on what programming rules you should always follow in your development practices.

Earlier today, more for my own interest, I asked the question on Twitter "What programming rules should you ALWAYS follow, regardless of the scenario you're working in?" In other words, are there programming rules that you ALWAYS should follow. It doesn't matter if it's a script to copy a bunch of files for a one time migration or if you're building the next Facebook (DON'T try to build the next Facebook. You will fail miserably. Build something else). In other words, what was the purist of programming rules.

Responses he received ranged from the simple to slightly more complex including:

• Always comment your code
• Test your code
• Use source control
• "Think. Think again. Then write code"
• Use a good debugger to help track down problems
• Make effective use of logging/output