I've been doing more code reviews lately and realized many common rules of thumb weren't percolating through the general developer community. There are tons of great books out there on design patterns, dependency injection, test driven development, ORM, etc. but few that cover simple basics and tricks useful for writing and maintaining production software.

I'll be posting a series of simple suggestions on how to improve the code you write. These rules of thumb are based on reviewing millions of lines of code mixed with dealing w/ the less often discussed aspect of software development: code maintenance lifecycle. Many are extremely basic and you likely already put them to practice. However some seemingly trivial changes can pay off over the long haul, particularly as software evolves across multiple developers. YMMV.