This is a talk about productivity, about getting things done, more than anything. Programmers that get their computer science degree are often taught how to optimize code, but this generally comes at a great expense to productivity. Indie game devs have to wear several hats (if not all of the hats), so time is too precious to be wasted.
There are several examples Blow goes through to illustrate this, some of which I think are very weak arguments given modern APIs (I'm referring to his hash table vs. arrays argument), but the majority of them are spot on. One that stood out in particular is the urge to make everything generic, when it may not be necessary. More often than not, a method you're writing will be a one off, only used to perform some type of action on one type of object, so time is absolutely wasted trying to make that method work on an entire hierarchy of objects.
The biggest take away is simply this: the simplest solution to implement is almost always the correct one. Get it done. Move on. Fix it/optimize it only when you absolutely need to.
