Your article is full of sound advice, written in a concise and understandable way. No real surprises for an old dog like me though. :-)

I just wanted to point out the problem with points 6 and 7.

"Don't reinvent the wheel" is always a catchy phrase and at first glance hard to contradict, but in my experience one of the most misused and useless mantras out there.

For one, the wheel wasn't really invented, but discovered as ist functions is foremost a physical principle and only secondly a technical invention. The technical side of it has (luckily) been reinvented, adapted, and improved upon thousands of times throughout history. The wheels highspeed trains run on and the wheels of a skateboard are both highly advanced wheels but technically they do not have a lot in common. And are far from the wheels of old Egyptian chariots.

Not reinventing the wheel more often than not is just an excuse not to do your own thinking and work. Consequently, instead of writing two perfectly adjusted functions with ten lines, a 1200-line Library is added that is largely a black box and is violating rule seven badly. (And makes the need of complex build tools greater, which do not add value but only try to soften the mistake you made by needing them in the first place.)

My way of expressing the rightful idea of rule number six would be something like: "Don't be too proud to follow the example of others - learn, adapt and improve if possible. But always understand what you are doing. Don't just trust and hope for the magic bullet"

Not nearly as catchy I know - still my 2.5 cents.