"Chunking" information
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DaveL posts an article about attaining better code through a concept that is familiar to chess players called 'chunking':
http://blogs.msdn.com/davidlem/archive/2006/09/20/762932.aspx
Mitch and I have talked about this concept a lot when discussing what makes good and great programmers. The chunking process is really a way to deal with complexity. To take a bunch of problems and be able to place them in different, higher level buckets or to peek at problems through different abstractions is a very important skill. Without the ability to "park" a bunch of complexity into some bucket you are left with myriad fine-grained details to manage and the complexity just grows and grows. This is what ultimately sinks poor developers.