Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
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Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
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Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#2you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal experience (and abilities to make the right decision for themselves) and their circumstances (the project itself) and it's always around something dogmatic/a reflection of fanboyism. most recently on #reactjs I wanted to know if there were a way to have locally scoped styles in react like in Vue - I got only condescension about how react is for "bigboys" and hence eschews the practice. Finally someone said hey maybe try styled-components, which was basically close enough and has 16,000 stars on GitHub (so I doubt it's "worst practices"). software devs are some of the most zealous people I've ever met - everything is an opportunity to bike shed and every question or difference of opinion is an opportunity to quarterback someone else's code base.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#3We’ve iterated on our process quite a bit for my startup. I agree that sometimes you need a completely new approach, but more often than not what already works for another team will most likely work for us with some small tweaks. What I find works pretty well is to think about the problem, apply our existing knowledge and experiences to the solution, make any obvious edits for our unique, then test it out. From there, we make tweaks if needed to get to what works, or we completely scrap what we know and try something completely new. Process, like product, requires iteration. But process is also built off conventions and modeled off core human behaviors. Chances are the wheel doesn’t need to be completely reinvented. My advice would be to fork what works on the process side, and use all your creative energy to come up with something new on the product side.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#4Being a tad pedantic and agree with the spirit of the article, but this just seems like a result from the overuse of the phrase 'best practices'.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#5you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal exp…
Best practices are a very wide category, don't parse HTML with regular expressions is the kind of thing you really should just say don't do that. Camelcase is the middle ground where it's a good idea but personal preference may show up yet people get just as dogmatic about it.
IMO, what trips people up is when wisdom says "don't use Oracle products" it's completely accurate, but not that helpful when you inherit a huge mess.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#6you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal exp…
A similar frustration I have is when you ask a specific question and get a "Why would you do it that way? Rearchitect your app this way!". That's not reasonable, outside the smallest of applications, regardless of if the underlying advice is sound.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#7you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal exp…
Sounds like the community might be a reason to use Vue over React ;)
In all seriousness this is a problem I've run into before as well. I once reported a bug and the lead developer of the project responded saying he didn't think the bug existed. Setting the hostname in the config to the server's IP address was irreversible even if you change it later -- the site would redirect back to the raw IP and outgoing emails would have the raw IP in them. Many other users were commenting about the issue with no response from the maintainer, and I ended up finding a workaround using one of the "developer options" which was really just a one line ruby config change. Then, the author wrote like a one paragraph response saying that you should never set up the software like that and not to use that workaround because it's a "developer option". This bug went unfixed for about 2 years after that. And this is a relatively common and high profile piece of open source software. The whole thing was just bizarre, especially how positive my experiences with other open source projects (some third party Spring packages and Go Dep in particular) have been.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#8you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal exp…
Best practices are a very wide category, don't parse HTML with regular expressions is the kind of thing you really should just say don't do that. Camelcase is the middle ground where it's a good idea but personal preference may show up yet people get just as dogmatic about it. IMO, what trips people up is when wisdom says "don't use Oracle products" it's completely accurate, but not that helpful when you inherit a hu…
>don't parse HTML with a regular expressions
Even if I agree with you (I don't know because I've never been in the situation where that was a thing I was considering and weighing against other options) what I'm arguing here is that if someone asks how to do that then you should either tell them along with the admonishment or not say anything at all. But don't go around being a dick by yelling "haha that's the dumbest thing ever and I'm not going to tell you because of best practices"
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#9Being a tad pedantic and agree with the spirit of the article, but this just seems like a result from the overuse of the phrase 'best practices'.
Exactly. "Best" practices don't always turn out to be the best, after all. "Better" practice might be a better (heh) fit.
It's often more useful to look at anti-patterns and avoid those (still with a grain of salt) than it is to go looking for a pre-existing "best" solution to your specific problem.
Re: Best Practices Are Not Always the Best
#10you know what grinds my gears? when I go looking for help on a problem and the answers I get are "don't do that it's not best practices". like not okay here's how you do it but you shouldn't but just flat out I'm not going to tell you. that's the most arrogant/presumptuous and consistent thing I've ever dealt with and it's absolutely unique to software development. It completely discounts the individuals personal exp…
Sounds like the community might be a reason to use Vue over React ;) In all seriousness this is a problem I've run into before as well. I once reported a bug and the lead developer of the project responded saying he didn't think the bug existed. Setting the hostname in the config to the server's IP address was irreversible even if you change it later -- the site would redirect back to the raw IP and outgoing emails w…
>Sounds like the community might be a reason to use Vue over React ;)
I've run into these "no I'm not telling you because of best practices" people in every single "community"