They’re advertising Colby Cosh’s blog on ESPN now. “What’s Cosh writing about?” “Hockey.” “What’s he writing about next?” “Hockey.” I’m getting the same way about programming. We will release the honest-to-god production version of our software Monday, and the experience has been, shall we say, instructive. The lessons include:

• The trouble with most programmers isn’t that they’re too lazy, it’s that they aren’t lazy enough. Never write anything until you absolutely have no other choice. (Regular readers will note how well I have absorbed this.)
• More classes = less code.
• “Marketing” tends not to attract the sharpest tools in the shed.
• If you refuse to test your own code righteously enough, eventually you can con somebody else into doing it for you.
• You cannot write good business application software unless you understand the business better than the people who make their living at it. This is mostly why business application software sucks, especially when it’s written by people in the business.
• In a client-server application, given the choice between working on the client or the server, always take the server. This is a lemma of the more general principle that at any job you should strive to stay as far away from the customer as possible.
• You never discover the right design until you have written an enormous amount of code based on the wrong design.
• A mediocre programmer is useless. His time would be better spent washing dishes or picking up trash.
• The better two programmers work together, the likelier they are to end up despising each other.
• In programming, especially, is George Pólya’s dictum true that it is often easier to solve the general case. In fact solving the special case is usually a waste of time.
• I’d rather be blogging. Honest.