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Brent Roose wrote down his thoughts around how things like fonts, spacing, docblock, ... can influence the cognitive load of a programmer.

As a professional programmer, I'm reading and writing code on a daily basis. I'm working on new projects, doing code reviews, working with legacy code, learning documentation etc. Based on my own experience and that of colleagues, being a programmer often involves a lot more reading than actually writing code. Whether it's your own code or that of others, when you open a file, you have to take it all in. You need to wrap your head around what's going on, before you're able to write your code. Doing this day by day, it's important to find ways to make this process easy. To try and reduce this cognitive load as much as possible. Streamlining the way you take in code, will allow you to not only work faster and better; but also improve your mental state and mood.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/a-programmers-cognitive-load

Visual debt is real.

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On the Tighten blog Samatha Geitz sums up the benefits of giving developers one day of "free" time a week.

About a year ago, Tighten officially implemented a "20% time" policy for its developers. This means that, on any given week, we only bill our clients for 32 hours of developer work; for the other 8 hours, developers can work on whatever projects they’d like to (as long as they can readily come up with an explanation of how it benefits the company in some way.) ... Here are some reasons that you may want to consider experimenting with a policy like this

https://blog.tighten.co/give-your-developers-20-percent-time

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Rob Allen, an active member of the Zend Framework community, makes the case for giving some love to API errors.

It's not hard to have great error responses; you just need to care. Poor error response cause developers to give up with an API and go elsewhere, so it's a competitive advantage to get this right.

Developers integrating with your API will thank you.

https://akrabat.com/api-errors-are-first-class-citizens

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Often, when I’m able to slip into a state of flow while coding, I will produce more in a single afternoon than I could in several days of non-flow. Yet this is often an elusive state to obtain. Luckily, research dedicated to this topic in recent decades offers some help. Here we’ll look into both the stages of flow and how to obtain the prerequisites for flow, making it possible in the first place.

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