This is an interesting article, and mirrors my experience of porting. I really loved seeing the advice from various other developers he consulted. It's a nice way to expand it from being just his experience to a more general statement about what it's like to port software. I never ported a commercial game, but did quite a bit of porting to Native Client. The parts about knowing your tools, knowing the project, and the process of porting are spot on.

One thing he didn't mention (or I missed it), is how it feels when your port starts to work. I found it to be thrilling to have a big pile of code that doesn't work at all, and it stays that way for a while, until suddenly almost everything seems to come together. It's very different from normal software development, which is more gradual. Porting software feels more like solving a puzzle.