Clean Coder, The: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers (Robert C. Martin Series)

by Robert C. Martin

You should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you. During this remaining 20 hours you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career.

Say. Mean. Do.

You can only commit to things that you have full control of.

If you don’t tell anyone about the potential problem as soon as possible, you’re not giving anyone a chance to help you follow through on your commitment.

Hope is the project killer. Hope destroys schedules and ruins reputations. Hope will get you into deep trouble.

Therefore you should not agree to work overtime unless (1) you can personally afford it, (2) it is short term, two weeks or less, and (3) your boss has a fall-back plan in case the overtime effort fails.

For now let me simply say that the training of less experienced programmers is the responsibility of those who have more experience.

it is a matter of professional ethics for senior programmers to spend time taking younger programmers under their wing and mentoring them.

“QA should find nothing,”

“Any argument that can’t be settled in five minutes can’t be settled by arguing.”

it is important to avoid committing to deadlines that we aren’t sure we can meet.

The trick to handling pressure is to avoid it when you can, and weather it when you can’t. You avoid it by managing commitments, following your disciplines, and keeping clean.