[joaomacp]

Moseley and Marks "Out of the tar pit" is a nice essay / paper.

Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" goes along the same vein, not an essay but a short book.

Both of these agree on something that I really relate with: the main thing to keep in mind in a software project is complexity.

Managing complexity to reduce cognitive load on programmers is something I always have in mind, it works not only within a codebase, but also across codebases that talk to each other through APIs, and even across software teams when considering their boundaries and modes of communication.