Cornerstones of a Good Program (Software)

Accuracy, Effeciency(Performance) and Simplicity, in that order, are, in my opinion the cornerstones of a good program.
Did not realize the importance of design and documentation until I stepped into the real world and started fixing and creating bugs. So often, I find myself criticizing the design. And most times, changing the design is too expensive (in terms of number of hours of coding and testing). Deadlines mean getting the application to work now and worry about legacy design flaws later. This is irritating. I have not yet been in a position where I could design a piece of functionality from scratch. Waiting for my turn. Meanwhile gathering experience..learning what makes a good design..and what the common design mistakes are...the pitfalls to avoid when designing. Gotta read that Design Patterns book...
And ah Database Tuning! Interesting and how important! Either applications have large number of people accessing the app resulting in several database operations being performed every unit of time. Or applications don't have as many users at a time, but do processing that accesses large amounts of data. Still learning the do's and dont's of writing code (and queries) that are tuned for performance.
Must learn more about Databases. Refreshed my knowledge of how indexes work today...had forgotten how an un-smart query would result in indexes not being used.

This post does not actually come under a blog titled 'Dreams Ahoy!' :D But no patience to create another blog....so here it stays.