The Top Five Developer Skills That'll Make You a Hero (Hint: Involves LEGOs) by Jean-Paul Delimat is a great read. His advice for working on real-world software projects is spot-on. His LEGO analogies are both effective and some of the most amusing things that I have read all week.

I've been known to use Voltaire's quote “Perfect is the enemy of good” in the context of finding the line between beautiful code solutions and the pragmatics of delivering on-time.

Delimat's article says it much better, as he talks about accepting unknowns and making the right sorts of compromises.