I enjoyed reading Seven Habits of Effective Developers, ZDNet Asia's interview with Sun staff engineer Lee Chuk Munn, who likens writing applications to writing books. The habits he cited include: understand the problem, use appropriate tools, strive for simplicity, and so forth.

Hard to argue with any of them, I think, in particular the points on simplicity and clarity. Those are goals for me as a technical writer, too. In my day-to-day work of coauthoring articles in collaboration with engineers, I aim for succinctness, accuracy, lucidity, and unambiguity.