Shirley Wu at I Was Lost But Now I Live Here blogs about a talk by Stanford's Joel Dudley on how to be an effective bioinformatics programmer. The blog post covers 12 tips, including: learn UNIX; learn one text editor very well; rely on established frameworks where possible; and be descriptive in naming your variables so that others can understand what's going on in the code. Shirley also includes a link to slides from the talk.