How I became an efficient software engineer

AUTOMATE
Personally, if I find myself doing twice something that I can automate, it is time to write a script.

PREMATURE OPTIMISATION
Your focus should be to write code that works and later make it efficient. Write code, use a profiler to find the real bottlenecks, and focus on optimizing them.

RUBBER DUCK DEBUGGING
A rubber duck in use by a developer to aid code review

In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck 🦆 and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line-by-line, to the duck.