The most important insight I've had in the last few years is that constraints are a feature, not a bug. When you have unlimited resources, you can solve any problem in a hundred different ways. When you have constraints—limited memory, limited time, limited developers—you're forced to think more clearly.

Terminal emulators are primitive tools compared to modern IDEs, but they force a certain discipline. You can't rely on auto-completion and syntax highlighting to write code for you; you have to understand what you're writing.

See also

More on this topic

The idea that frameworks solve problems is mostly marketing. They shift the nature of the problems, making some things easier and others harder. The trick is choosing the right tools for your constraints.

The best code is often the code you don't write.

Type systems don't prevent bugs—they just catch certain categories of bugs earlier. The real benefit is the documentation they provide about what a function is supposed to do.