Regular readers of this blog know that I like to keep things simple and easy. Partly for my own peace of mind, and partly if it is simple then other programmers can quickly understand what my code does. A colleague calls this the K.I.S.S. methodology, which stands for "Keep It Simple Stupid", although she often changes the last "S" to "Simon" (I am not sure what she is trying to imply by this).
A good example is when using SQL to insert a row/record into a table/file. If not all the columns/fields need to be filled I need to give them a default value. This means that I need to look at the table and determine the data type of each column and whether it can be null or not, which takes time and can leave to errors if I try and accidentally insert a columns/field with the wrong default value.