Efficient? Yes, but Reliable and maintainable first.

WHY?

• Maintaining software is still the most expensive part of a company's software development life cycle.
• Once changes are in production, it becomes hard to fix.
• You do not know who will work on this codebase in the future.
• Always better to spend a little more time and effort to make your codebase readable.

LOW HANGING PRINCIPLES

• "Leave the playground cleaner than you found it"
• DRY
• SRP
• Comment
• "Later equals never"
• "The only way to make deadlines and the only way to make iterations as quick as possible is to keep your code as clean as possible at all times"

IMPORTANT PRINCIPLES (me)

• COMMENTS
• !DOCUMENTATION!
• PAIR PROGRAMMING*
• CODE REVIEWS
• TESTING

Documentation

The following document should be made for every project (this is my personal opinion):

1. DLD (Detailed level design): Class/file design spec for every file/function/class in their respective layer
2. HLD (High-level design): System architecture must be explained properly.
3. Database Design document: Table files or entities and volatility of every table must be mentioned.
4. Bug tracker.

Thank You