"There are no tricks or rules that you can follow to guarantee you will write good software. As Alex Stepanov said, 'think, and then the code will be good.'"

Excellent conclusion, can't think of anything else. I don't know how many times I've seen programmers apply latest patterns and use trendy libraries only to make a terrible mess out of thing.

I literary heard a guy say last week "we should use MongoDb, it is better than SQL". No context, no arguments, just read a blog entry or I don't know what.

There are no golden bullets, think, and then the code will be good :)