Good advice, but I don't know if I would call it a best kept secret. Maybe I've just been reading all of the right books.

Fred Brooks: "Show me your flow charts and conceal your tables and I shall continue to be mystified, show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious."

Rob Pike: "Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming."

Eric S. Raymond: "Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust."

Peter Norvig: "Use data-driven programming, where pattern/action pairs are stored in a table."