The Developer's Code – What Real Programmers Do – by Ka Wai Cheung is supposed to contain “nuggets of wisdow” on how to sustain a healthy relationship with your work.
Overall, I found a few interesting tidbits on the whole thing. It is a relatively pleasant read and worth the time to read it and the price of the book.
What I liked:
– The Parallels between architecture and developing – and why some of the architectural metaphors can make planning excessive for software
– Perk can be destructive for higher-level thinking (according to a TED talk from Dan Pink on motivation)
– If you can, start writing the most interesting part of o program and work out from there
– First impressions of a program can be skewed because we don't know how we will conform to it
– Suggestions on how to schedule pet projects
– Make two things better about the software each day – even if they are small items such as better error messages and comments
– Some techniques for handling your to-dos
– the off-time concept – where for two hour shift per developer, there are no interruptions
– the generals ideas on code generation.