What are the golden rules of programming?

1. Make sure you understand the problem you’re trying to solve.
2. Prioritize clarity and correctness. Performance is less important, and cleverness is to be avoided.
3. If your code needs comments to be understood, it’s over-complicated.
4. Always comment your code, or at least your modules.
5. Extensibility and reusability are over-rated.
6. Don’t innovate security. Use well-established security libraries.
7. If you haven’t tested it, it probably doesn’t work.
8. If you have time to ‘go back and fix it later’ you’ve got bigger problems in your job.
9. Integrated Development Environments (like VisualStudio) and the internet (e.g. StackOverflow) are the best friends a coder could ever have.
10. printf/print is the world’s simplest debugger.

Checkout the Python Debugger IPDB.