It was a dark and stormy night

Elmore Leonard once wrote that the key to great writing is to leave out the boring bits that people skip.

Hemingway wrote that "The first draft of anything is shit."

Robert McKee: "No one has to see your failures unless you add vanity to folly and exhibit them."

Hawthorne: "Easy reading is damn hard writing."

I think there are obvious parallels in software development, which I won’t spell out. Leonard also said never to start a book with a description of the weather. If I could shoe-horn that into a software development analogy then I would.