[zubat]

My number one piece of programming advice is that you can always find a simpler way - and if you have R&D time to sink into simplifying your problem, doing so is a good idea - but actually simplifying is a very hard task and there is no blogpost tip or design pattern that will do it: it requires knowing your problem very deeply and being willing to shave a few yaks and reinvent a few wheels and generally grind away at something that was already solved, but in a way you find dissatisfying.

If the problem is genuinely original to you, your best bet is to find the biggest leveraging factors(language, tools, libraries, etc.) and consistently lean on those to arrive at a solution fast, then pay down the resulting debt in dependencies, performance and gaps in UX later. This can actually aid in an R&D effort because reaching a clunky solution quickly will lend a certain maturity to the codebase and the problem you're addressing. But it means being willing to read and reuse code that you are personally uncomfortable with and know does not really solve the specified problem exactly. This is a revision-heavy process and it's antithetical to what many programmers are inclined to do - which is to get everything finalized in one shot, drawing on all the stuff they know is the "best practice" even if it's tangential to shipping.

The more you're willing to allow your code to be "knowingly wrong" in ways that are easy to call out and to return to later, the faster you can get to the stage when actually revising it has value. This is why everyone writes bad code yet some code looks better than others: the good code was bad code that solved the right problem, then revised.