With the low barrier to entry, writing mods has become very popular. While this has greatly benefited the WoW community, it does have a dark side. There are idiosyncrasies in both the Lua language and the World of Warcraft API that many authors overlook. This can lead to poorly written programs as measured by performance, memory usage, interference with other addons and the default UI, etc. The techniques gathering on this page will help help addon authors, experienced and otherwise, make the most out of WoW's environment safely and efficiently.