The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.
As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.
Keep it simple, make it general, and make it intelligible.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.