Don't be specific

When coding, you should attempt to be the least specific as possible. One way to achieve this is by using more variables.

This is beneficial because if you ever need to update your code you only do it at one location, easy maintenance. I created an application that fetched data from a database. But coded using code specific to a table and database at multiple locations in the app. When I decided to change the table I would get an error because different parts of the code was requesting data from different tables. It took me hours to search through my code to match all these request.