Ah heyas, sorry it's taken so long to get around to answering. Things have been pretty busy.
Thanks for the kind words, took quite a while to get this far for me ^^
As far as general tips and tricks, I'm not very good at explaining things, but I'll try conveying the ideas to the best of my ability.
Typically I find the easiest way to go about creating spells/systems and just generally working with programming, is to have the general idea of the structure of your spell/system/whatever before you start working on it, then creating all the variables you think you'll need to do it, instead of having to constantly go back and add more later, you work a lot faster and more cleanly when you're not making it up as you go along (both in the structure of your programming and the idea of what you want the programming to do). It also helps to add a sort of structure where you can easily pause, stop, and come back later without having to re-read your script to know where you are/what you're doing.
Naturally you then have the more cliché advice of when you get stuck, it tends to help to leave for 10-15 minutes, then come back, sometimes you get too involved and miss the obvious things. I myself have a bad habit of getting too focussed in and missed the fact that I was forgetting a degrees to radians conversion for 30 minutes, for example.
I guess for those aiming to get more into programming and such, really the best advice is to study other people's work which is a bit higher (not hugely) than your own understanding, can make a lot of progress very quickly if you do that. My own work tends to be a bit bad for that, because of the massive walls of script which are very offputting and the less-obvious structure. but, if you break it down, long scripts can become a lot easier, just don't try to absorb all the information at once I suppose.
I'm not sure how much my advice would help, but I'm always around in the hive chatroom, so if you wish to talk more or need me to explain anything I'm saying (all too aware of how bad I am at explaining) you should be able to catch me there relatively easily
- T-C