When writing a program, I generally don't just write it in any old way that might work, I set myself some constraints. Generally these constraints are particular programming principles that I have found make my life easier in the long run, such as choosing appropriate names. Sometimes I'll try to maximize speed or minimize memory usage. For Argulator I tried to minimize the number of SQL queries I made to satisfy any given request (which led to some convolutions to do appropriate data caching on the PHP side.) I also tried to make the page sent by the server as close as possible to the page that actually gets rendered (i.e. make Javascript not needed to display the page, just to interact with it). I mostly succeeded, at the expense of having some code duplication between the server side and the client side (though the argument creation UI is partially created by Javascript).
Sometimes I'll try to eschew certain operations, such as eliminating the square root operation in the algorithm to determine if a point is in the Mandelbrot cardioid. Often I'll try to eliminate subtraction and division and write algorithms in terms of addition and multiplication instead. This might seem to be a strange thing to do but the resulting algorithms are often more concise and it's easier to tell that they're correct. This can also eliminate division by zero errors.