The importance of simplicity and common sense.
It's about time for another blog entry...
I find that the two most coveted attributes in a programmer is the appreciation for simple elegant solutions and plain common sense.
It seems as though there are too many of us that enjoy making life unnecessarily complicated within the systems we write/design.
It’s easy to complicate things nowadays with the wide array of abstraction mechanisms we have at our disposal. I always respect programmers/architects that can come up with a simple and scalable solutions. This inevitably pushes the system's complexity into the business rules where it belongs.
Unfortunately, I still find that a lot of programmers/architects make life unnecessarily complicated for the sake of job security. I feel that the one of the most overlooked issues by non-technical/technical management is the responsibility of the programmer (on top of getting the work done on time and within budget) to write self documenting and maintainable code.
Common sense is the one attribute all great programmers have.