Regarding Simplicity (in code)

The actual task is to come to the best solution that suits the requirements in the shortest amount of time. That’s what your manager wants and that’s what the company wants. Where you shine, as a fancy pants and experienced engineer, is in doing exactly that while leaving yourself wiggle room to get more performance and more features out of what you’ve written once they come back to you for more. The trick is never in building the best possible implementation — the trick is in building the implementation that will provide the best possible future. The best possible implementation changes from year to year according to hardware trends or the software you’ve build upon. The implementation that will provide you with the best possible future changes far less frequently. When you understand the problem space well enough you’ll be able to define the implementation accordingly. When you do, implement the simplest possible solution you can and leverage the abstractions you’ve built from your experience to give you as much wiggle room to change things the next time out.