http://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html
blog-post-organizational-skill-beats-algorithmic-wizardry#quote1 2When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. I've worked on large telecommunications systems, console games, blogging software, a bunch of personal tools, and very rarely is there some tricky data structure or algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else. But there's always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there. blog-post-organizational-skill-beats-algorithmic-wizardry#quote1 2
He talks about how one of the hard parts is handling-the-data-flow in the program he was working on, and that rectangle-packing, while challenging, was simple once done.