Christian Mackeprang has a post to his site with some ideas about reducing the "cognitive load" of your code - basically making it easier to follow, read and understand.

Low bug count, good performance, easy modification. Good code is high-impact, and is perhaps the main reason behind the existence of the proverbial 10x developer. And yet, despite it’s importance, it eludes new developers. Literature on the subject usually amounts to disconnected collections of tips. How can a new developer just memorize all that stuff? “Code Complete“, the greatest exponent in this matter, is 960 pages long!

I believe it’s possible to construct a simple mental framework that can be used with any language or library and which will lead to good quality code by default. There are five main concepts I will talk about here. Keep them in mind and writing good code should be a breeze.

His tips center around concepts like:

• following coding standards for consistency
• clarification through modularization
• overall readability and application structure
• good naming on variables and methods/functions

For each topic he gives a brief summary and some example code, usually showing what not to do and a solution or two to help with the clarification.