Ask Slashdot: How Would You Teach 'Best Practices' For Programmers?

An anonymous reader writes: I've been asked to put together a half-day workshop whose title is "Thinking Like a Programmer." The idea behind this is that within my institution (a university), we have a vast number of self-taught programmers who have never been taught "best practices" or anything about software engineering. This workshop's intention is to address this lack of formal training.

The question is, what should be covered in this workshop? If you have an idea -- that also has an example of best practice -- please share!
It's really two questions -- what "thinking like a programmer" topics should be covered, but also what examples should be used to illustrate best practices for the material. So leave your best thoughts in the comments.

How would you teach best practices for programmers?

Comments

Learn math

[Master5000]

There is no way around it. Never seen a great developer without strong analytical skills.

Re:Learn math

[Z00L00K]

Always break down the problem into small parts that are easy to manage and test.

Re:Back to basics

[Strider-]

Oh hell no. So-called “self-documenting code” isn’t. You can write the most comprehensible, clear code in the history of mankind, and that’s still not good enough.

The issue is that your code only documents what the code is doing, not what it is supposed to be doing. You wouldn’t believe how many subtle issues I’ve come across over the decades where on the face of it everything should have been good, but in reality the code was behaving slightly differently than what was intended.