Ask HN: Best Practices Guides You're Aware Of

"If you feel it's a bit brusque to simply say "Hi" and ask the question, you can still preface your message with as many pleasantries as you see fit". Just don't submit the message with only pleasantries.

It doesn’t say to not say hello, or simply says don’t leave an empty hello without context. This makes a lot of sense especially in asynchronous teams. A notification can pull you out of flow and be disruptive, so minimize them

The problem is not with "Hi" or "Hello" immediately followed by the question.

The problem is when people write "Hi"/"Hello" without the question, then waiting for the reply, then want to simulate a smalltalk, and only then asking the question.

In many cases they're not even thought about this question in advance, and didn't framed it or phrased it, to make it easier on the other side to understand the problem.

"Hi"

[8 hours later due to different TZ]

"Hey there, can I help you?"

[8 hours later due to different TZ]

"Can I ask a question?"

[8 hours later due to different TZ]

"Of course, you don't need to ask that!"

[8 hours later due to different TZ]

asks question

[8 hours later due to different TZ]

gives answer

---

That's often been my problem with that.

I'm all for politeness, but these are people I work with, not strangers, and it's basically my job to answer their questions, and they know I'm in a different timezone, and whom I've told that they can just ask their question directly. Certainly in this context I don't think it's any less polite than "Hi there, how you doing? I'd like to ask a question: [question]".

No one is really helped with this: not the developer or support staff who wants an answer, not customer who has to wait longer for an answer.

I also answer these sort of things outside work hours (I don't mind doing that, I also get a lot of flexibility in return), and three different messages is more invasive than just one. Actually, come to think of it, it's less polite to do it the "polite" way.

I mean you can say hello, that's not the issue. Saying hello and waiting for the other party to reply before continuing is.

I mean would you send an e-mail with just a "Dear $name" and nothing else?

Sure, but opinions touted as authoritative "best practices" lists don't need to be a part of that.

I hate microservices with a passion, but still use 12factor when coding, they're good guidelines for monoliths too.

Yes, I agree, and I'll nuance my previous comment a bit by saying that I actually think many "best practices" have good advice in them, at least for some situations, and sometimes even most situations, and in that sense they often are worth reading. I just wish people would stop calling them "best practices" or even "methodologies" and would just call them "an idea I had" or "this is how I like to do things" or "here are the advantages to X". The change in tone just puts an entire different spin on things, and will ultimately be helpful for everyone as the reader will be less tempted to just accept things as an axiom, and will generally lead to more thoughtful and constructive discourse.

I've done that kind of by mistake, in that I wrote some UI screens and saw how to hook them together. But learning Textual, some Python, and object oriented Python all at once was difficult for me.

    What is a "Python developer helper app"? 

To deploy dev/test AWS resources, the devs have to hit a bunch of different cloud and internal sites. It's a lot of annoying and slow clicks+waits that I wanted to streamline for them. It's also full of risk because you have to copy values from one place to another, often changing them a little first.

By "standard layered" arch, do you mean model/view/controller? If so, I can read up some more on that. (I'm devops, mostly focused on terraform, and I'm trying to move away from writing bash scripts to Python)

EDIT: thank you for your answer, it's helpful to me.