Software development -- from a designer's perspective

I am traditionally a front-end web designer/developer, so diving head-first into AEM development is a bit of a stretch for me. I get how the HTML and CSS fit together. I get how to take apart my pages and put them back together. I know how to design a page and make it user friendly -- I don't know how to think in terms of software development though.

Hence this post. A helpful page I just found on ways to think about working with the Java Content Repository: David's Model: A guide for content modeling

In brief, seven simple rules:

• Rule #1: Data First, Structure Later. Maybe.
• Rule #2: Drive the content hierarchy, don't let it happen.
• Rule #3: Workspaces are for clone(), merge() and update().
• Rule #4: Beware of Same Name Siblings.
• Rule #5: References considered harmful.
• Rule #6: Files are Files are Files.
• Rule #7: ID's are evil.