The use of 'Patterns' in the title is getting some heat but I think it's because his title 'Patterns for Research in Machine Learning' is a little play on 'Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning' (usually known as 'PRML' or 'Bishop') which is a text book by Chris Bishop, arguably the bible in the field.
This is good advice, especially saving intermediate calculations to file which can make iteration much faster. I have witnessed a lot of research students set a job running which will take about an hour, look at the results, say 'd'oh!', change one line of code in one of their functions and set the whole monolith running again, needlessly repeating about 55 minutes worth of the hour's computations.