Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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Technique

Expressing intent

This is my primary guiding principle: the program must express my intent -- both to humans and computers. And it must do so as clearly and simply as possible.

Some examples to make this concrete:

a program could be written to cleanly and correctly express complicated business logic; perhaps best structured as a DSL with unit tests and canaries
it could be a teaching aide, written to be simple and explicit and easy to debug
something meant to run terribly fast, orchestrated as Python over a native extension where it's simply manipulating memory from the outside
a learning exercise, with a tremendous amonut of observability and interactiveness built into fundamental pieces

Getting this right defines a lot of downstream decisions crisply -- which dependencies I want to take, how fast I'll be able to iterate, how much memory I can afford to use -- and effectively defines the spine of the program.

By definition, the intent must bake in broader context the program will be used in as well; whether it's just for me, or for a team to maintain, throwaway or production software.

Python is astonishingly expressive, and lends itself really well to this style of programming: you can apply it's metaprogramming features well enough to make accomplishing the intent easy.