document best practices to keep projects lean and easy to debug

[maxheld83]

instead of improving debugging #125, it's better not to have to debug so much in the first place.
Keeping the design of your project (from a simple document to a large piece of software) lean, and lightweight (not so many dependencies) and a bunch of other strategies can help you spend more time doing, and less time debugging.

Here too, it'd be great to add a bunch more resources, best practices and links to the website.

Below some of my suggestions from todays class.

[maxheld83]

1. Use as few tools in your toolchain as possible. Don't be afraid to go minimal. Consider not whether an addition would be "nice to have", but whether it's worth the inevitable cost in complexity.
2. Use well-established tools that do few things, and do them well. Tie them together. No monolothic tools that do everything.
3. Make upgrading really easy and systematic.
4. Rely on established software. Newcomers need to prove themselves first. Consider name recognition of contributors, reputation of projects, organisations and activity on github.

There are also "pro" steps to go about this, though these add their own complexity to a project:

5. Use a continous integration / continuous delivery service (such as Travis CI). This gives you an "official" benchmark system against which to test.
6. Migrate to a VM or containerised solution.