Comments are a useful tool to give contextual information directly in the source code. They are most typically used as a clarification comments and documentation comments (top Google result for code comments). However, there is a third use which I found comments to be useful for, documenting history!
As developers, we are always searching for ways to make our code more concise, structured and understandable. Therefore, short code is preferred over longer code. This post explains why generally we find shorter code better and what some exceptions are.
Technical debt sounds scary. From what we know from financial debt, all debt has some inherent risk that it starts consuming all the income/revenue one has. One becomes insolvent and that is not at all what one wants to be. That same thing may happen with technical debt too. If all development efforts are used up by maintenance tasks and no actual progress can be made, a project or organization reaches technical insolvency.
A software development guideline is a document that determines important rules for the processes, tools, design and architecture used by a team of software developers (programmers, QA folks, product managers…). It is my firm belief that every team of software developers should have such a guideline for the reasons that will be laid out in this article.