Productivity is most important by engineering management rules, but enjoyment is most important for engineers. One stems from the other.
Fancy algorithms are slow when N is small, and N is usually small.
Procedure names should reflect what they do; function names should reflect what they return
When there is no type hierarchy you don't have to manage the type hierarchy.
A smart terminal is not a smartass terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate.
Sockets are the X windows of IO interfaces.