Rethinking Best Practices

Tech world loves its best practices. “Always write tests first.” “Use microservices.” “Follow SOLID principles religiously". Everyone swears by them, but do they really work for you? Sure, they promise success, but here’s the catch: what’s hailed as a silver bullet often misses the mark when applied blindly. Let’s explore why.

The Allure of Best Practices

Let’s be honest, best practices are seductive. But Why?

• Comfort of Certainty: Best practices come with sense of security, backed by experts and big companies.

• Reduce Decision Fatigue: Having pre-made decisions is mentally comfortable.

• Social Proof Factor: If everyone else is doing it, it must be right, right? Wrong

Reality Check: They’re not universal. What works for a big corporation might not work for your scale of project.

Question isn't that best practices are right or wrong – Of Course they’re right in ways for its specific contexts.

Real question is, Are they right in ways that matter for your specific situation? 🧐 

🔥 The Spicy Truth about Best Practices

Your Code Will Never Be Perfect: And that's okay, right. As Jeff Atwood says, "The best code is no code at all." Want to know the second best? “The code that actually ships.”

Best Practices Have Expiration Dates: What was best practice in 2016 might be anti-pattern in 2024. Remember when everyone thought jQuery was the future? (I still love PHP 😬 )

Context is the King: Imagine, a startup tries to adopt FAANG’s approval workflows and ends up spending more time in meetings than building & shipping the product.

Amazon's Counterintuitive Victory over 'Best Practices'

Even tech giants sometimes find that "best practices" need a reality check. In 2023, Amazon Prime Video's UI team made waves by moving from a distributed serverless architecture (often touted as a best practice) to a monolithic architecture, resulting in a stunning 90% reduction in operating costs and improved performance.

This isn't just a story about architecture choices – it's a powerful reminder that even Amazon, with all its resources, sometimes finds that simpler solutions can outperform supposedly "superior" best practices, simply because it wasn’t best for them.

Learn more here - Prime Video From Serverless to Monolith

Finding the Right Balance

Understand the Why

• Ask questions. Why was this practice successful? Does it align with your goals?

• What are the costs of implementing this practice?

• Think about long-term scalability & maintainability.

Adapt, Don’t Adopt

• Treat them as flexible guidelines, not unchangeable laws.

• Add your team’s flair. You don’t have to apply it, if it doesn’t make sense for your project needs.

Experiment First

• Run a pilot project before going all-in.

• Measure the impact and adjust accordingly.

• Keep a "technical debt journal" (It’s like a diary but with more semi-colons)

Pragmatic Programmer's Manifesto

• Good code that ships is better than perfect code that doesn't

• Context matters more than universal rules

• Best practices are guidelines, not commandments

Parting Thoughts

I'm not against following best practices – far from it. They're invaluable guideposts that represent hard-won wisdom from countless developers' experiences. My message is simple - don’t just blindly follow those, do research when to apply them and importantly, when to adapt them.

Until next time, Cheers

Have you ever followed a best practice only to find it backfired? Join the conversation on LinkedIn and 𝕏 

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Thanks for reading,
Kelvin
TechParadox.dev

Credits -

• Thumbnail image by infoprolearning