Un texto para mantener siempre a mano

Cómo ser un programador...Por si no lo conocía, debiera leerlo y tenerlo a mano. Un breve escrito, "How to be a programmer" desarrolla recomendaciones acerca de cómo escribir código, documentarlo, estimar tiempos, manejar un equipo y participar en él, testear, y , en general, las actividades diarias del trabajo de una persona y un equipo dedicados al desarrollo de código.
Robert Read, su autor, lo presenta así:

To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one's coworkers and customers. Writing computer programs is important and takes great intelligence and skill. But it is really child's play compared to everything else that a good programmer must do to make a software system that succeeds for both the customer and myriad colleagues for whom she is partially responsible.
In this essay I attempt to summarize as concisely as possible those things that I wish someone had explained to me when I was twenty-one. This is very subjective and, therefore, this essay is doomed to be personal and somewhat opinionated. I confine myself to problems that a programmer is very likely to have to face in her work. Many of these problems and their solutions are so general to the human condition that I will probably seem preachy. I hope in spite of this that this essay will be useful