Keep a programming journal
As long as we're on this subject, I'd like to strongly encourage programmers to adopt a "pen-and-paper" approach to problem solving. Just like mentionned in the article, there are great benefits coming from actually writing down the problem.<p>For the past year or so, every time I worked on a non-trivial problem, I did it on a sheet of paper. It definitely took discipline at first but now I couldn't do it any other way.<p>My motivation for adopting this approach came from reading a blog post by Guido Van Rossum (<a href="http://neopythonic.blogspot.fr/2011/07/before-python.html" rel="nofollow">http://neopythonic.blogspot.fr/2011/07/before-python.html</a>).<p><pre><code>  Then I went to university in Amsterdam to study mathematics and they had a computer that was free for students to use!

 (Not unlimited though. We were allowed to use something like one second of CPU time per day. :-)
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"One second of CPU time per day" got me thinking. Sure there are benefits to having modernly cheap computers, but how did they do it before?