> What Trick of the Trade took you too long to learn?

"Everything worth doing is worth doing badly"

And as a corollary, every complex system that works came from a simple system that works.

I learned this in programming, but now I apply it on everything from motorcycle maintenance, home appliance repair to parenting.

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Often the easier way to fix a complex system is to pretend that it could be simpler and then reintroduce the complexity-inducing requirements.

I had a professor who taught debugging as a whole another skill from programming and used to say "Most of programming is starting from an empty editor and debugging until your code works".

The debugging "lab" in Java course (in the year 2000) was one of my transformational after-school classes - where I got a java program which fits within 2-3 pages of print code with a bug and was told to go find it in print for ~20 minutes, then given 40 minutes with a debugger instead.