Show your work to people

I've spent a chunk of today improving the Hull Pixelbot software. The improvements were identified when I was showing off the software at the hardware group last week. There's nothing like showing off your stuff to flag up faults and issues in it. Things that seemed like carefully thought out design decisions turn out the be horrible ways of doing things. And if you're lucky the person you're trying to impress will come up with ideas and suggestions that will make what you've building even better.

Perhaps you might be a bit afraid of doing this, but in my experience it makes a huge difference to the quality of a product to have someone take a look who hasn't spent ages living with it.