I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me. If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a team and there’s something about the system that’s very easy to screw up, but no one thinks about ways to make it harder to make that mistake.