That must have been before I started reading Joel. I had to discover most of that list the hard way. The best way I’ve found to create pockets of excellence is to start from the build system (or once from version control) and build up and out from there. You need lines in the sand, where on one side of the line nothing stupid is happening. You can sometimes build that down at the bottom of a call tree, but if you can delay the moment in the code where the first really stupid thing happens, you can give yourself a toehold you can build out from, like branches of a tree. You also start to have some of the knowledge necessary to become a lead, because you begin to see how the pieces fit together and everyone sees your hand in the commit history, instead of buried in leaf functions nobody looks at.