I have a guest post, Lessons in Software from Alok Srivastava, on Shaping Software.  Alok is a solution architect at Microsoft with several years of experience in large scale, distributed systems.  In this post, he shares his lessons learned in software.  Here is a summary of his lessons:

• Lesson 1. Software development is a team sport.
• Lesson 2. More lines-of-code does not mean better software.
• Lesson 3. The Cloud is an inflection point.
• Lesson 4. Scalability, performance and diagnostic ability are better achieved at design time.
• Lesson 5. User experience and user expectation change continuously that is why UI projects are never done.
• Lesson 6. Software maintainability is a key to longer life for any software.
• Lesson 7. Development process should help development produce good quality software, if it comes in your way change it.
• Lesson 8. Take agility with a grain of salt; result –oriented software development is what agility should help you gain.
• Lesson 9. A great software engineer never stops working.
• Lesson 10. Know the keys to writing great software; magic isn’t one of them.

You can read an explanation of the lessons in his post, Lessons In Software from Alok Srivastava.