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Last active December 28, 2025 17:01
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Chris Zimmerman's The Rules of Programming
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The Rules of Programming.md
  1. As Simple as Possible, but No Simpler
  2. Bugs Are Contagious
  3. A Good Name Is the Best Documentation
  4. Generalization Takes Three Examples
  5. The First Lesson of Optimization Is Don’t Optimize
  6. Code Reviews Are Good for Three Reasons
  7. Eliminate Failure Cases
  8. Code That Isn’t Running Doesn’t Work
  9. Write Collapsible Code
  10. Localize Complexity
  11. Is It Twice as Good?
  12. Big Teams Need Strong Conventions
  13. Find the Pebble That Started the Avalanche
  14. Code Comes in Four Flavors
  15. Pull the Weeds
  16. Work Backward from Your Result, Not Forward from Your Code
  17. Sometimes the Bigger Problem Is Easier to Solve
  18. Let Your Code Tell Its Own Story
  19. Rework in Parallel
  20. Do the Math
  21. Sometimes You Just Need to Hammer the Nails
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