Hey folks,

if there is one thing I have consistently noticed while working with other programmers than its the following:

Symmetry is beauty. People who get it are people who recognize and apply symmetry to their work.

If I see new people coming in on a project the first things I look for are this: Do they pick up the coding standard used so far? If not, is at least their own coding standard consistent? Are they using patterns and does everything they do have a distinct "style"? Do they pick up on the overall style of the project and copy the solution patterns used so far?

No matter how "good" a programmer is by himself - being able to work symmetrical is the most important factor for team work. Yes, its not always fun to keep sticking to some old patterns if you have so many new and better ideas. But usually the discipline of not polluting your project with too many different approaches creates beautiful and easy to maintain applications.

-- Felix Geisendörfer aka the_undefined

PS: Sorry for the short post, but we had a little CakePHP get together at my place last night which I'll write about later on today.