[austin-cheney]

Less is more.

The more senior you become the less you need to accomplish ever more ambitious products. Applying some Cartesian logic to programming you will realize there are few unavoidable aspects of programming and everything else should generally be avoided. Consider these:

* flow control

* transmission

* data structures

* operators

Those things are necessary as avoiding them becomes more costly than not. So, use that to your advantage. Write code knowing you must master those and they become the principles on which everything is created. So, you know what the foundation looks like and generally know what the end state looks like. Good taste is how elegantly you can populate that massive gap between foundation and end state.

Most programmers completely miss this line of thinking and instead spend all their energy applying unnecessary code decorations, which I call lipstick on a pig's asshole. Instead solve the problem as directly as possible and reuse common solutions where convenient. Finally, structure and/or describe the code such that the actual flow control, such as the stack trace, directly reflect the logic as easily read by a human.

After some practice programming like this you will form instant visions for solving challenging problems. The structure of the code will just appear in your head faster than your fingers can type it into a keyboard. You will have put the Lego pieces together so many times that you will just know how to build that world-class cathedral without thinking in terms of the Lego pieces. If instead you need unnecessary code decorations you will continue to think about which Lego piece is most beautiful instead of just building the damn cathedral.