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Elegance always pays off

In the short term, it might seem like it takes much longer to come up with a truly graceful solution to a problem, but when it works the first time and easily adapts to new situations instead of requiring hours, days, or months of struggle to update down the line, you'll reap the rewards in saved time and sanity—even if no one else can measure them. Not only will this strategy yield a program that's easier to build and debug, but your applications will also be easier to understand and maintain, and that's where the financial value lies. It protects your company's investment in the original program development, so that even if every programmer on the original development team moves on to other things, new talent can pick up where they left off. This point can take some experience to understand, because it can appear that you're not being productive while you're making a piece of code elegant. Resist the urge to hurry; it will only create inefficiencies.

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Elegance always pays off	Use bare bones methodology
First make it work, then make it fast	Automate everything
Remember the "divide and conquer" principle	Write test code early
Separate the class creator from the class user (client programmer)	Get abstract
Name classes intelligently	An indirection should have a meaning