Thoughts On Best Practices

OH: “Do programmers have any specific superstitions?”

“Yeah, but we call them best practices.”

-- David Grandinetti

Good read on best practices:

"It has a chilling effect on our progress as an intellectual craft when people pretend that a best practice exists" -- James Bach

"Rather than simply stating what we've done and how we did it, we feel compelled to puff it up into a spiny, intimidating best practice. We attach our egos to our code frameworks. If someone doesn't agree with our approach, they're attacking us personally. If someone has a different best practice, they're amateurs who don't understand the problem domain" -- Jeff Atwood

My aversion on best practices, everyone has their own beliefs, it follows that everyone has their own notion of best practice


There's really no one best practice, everyone has one; or should we just take it the easy way and just find like-minded folks who share our notion of best practice? It's not good to find folks who'll just reinforce same beliefs, things are a lot better and interesting when we find others who can find loopholes or provide constructive criticism on things we believe are right



Lastly, most of the time, I find that people who tend to ask a best practice question can be classified in two types, either they are lazy and wanted to be spoonfed or an askhole



Believing our practice is the best practice, tends to make us crap on other people's choice and enthusiasm, and it's not good



Better not to believe there's a best practice at all especially if we will just use it on intimidating other people



Happy Coding!