In his latest weblog entry, testing guru Joe Walnes brings up the subject of
Maintanability Patterns - “techniques we can employ to make code more maintainable”.

This is a subject near and dear to my heart - I’ve seen gobs of unmaintainable
code in my life. Gobs.

For my money, no other pattern can challange this one for #1:
MAKING YOUR CODE AS CLEAN, ELEGANT AND SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE.

There is no substitute for this one - unless (maybe) you’re a unit testing
genius and you can predict every possible outcome of your code.

If you can’t read your own code and understand EXACTLY what it’s doing,
you’re going to maintain the beast for the next 10 years (unless you quit
of course)