How other engineering industries deal with this phenomena? Why those approach do not work with programming? I feel silly sometimes because software development is huge industry and we don't have consensus on basics.
For example I think that strict formatting is a good thing. Since I tried to use Prettier I'm using it and similar tools everywhere and I like it. I can't do vertical alignment anymore, it eats empty lines sometimes, but that's a good compromise.
May be there should be a good compromise when it comes to "best practices"? Like "DRY" is not always best, but it's always good enough, so extract common stuff every time, even if you feel it's not worth it.
I often deal with this dilemma when writing Java with default Idea inspections. They highlight duplicated code and now I need to either disable this inspection in some way or extract the chunk of code that I don't really think should be extracted, but I just can do it and move on...
I think we're more like Pythagoras: some useful theory about numbers, taken way too far and became an actual religion[0] listening to the Delphic[1] Oracle[2].
[0] Tabs or spaces? Vi or emacs? Is the singularity the rapture of the nerds, with Roko's Basalisk as the devil and ${insert name here according to personal taste} as the antichrist? SOLID or move fast and break things?
Other engineering disciplines have certification, codes and regulations for specific domains, which are enforced by law.
DRY is a perfect example though of something which in moderation is a good idea but as the article says is vulnerable to ‘inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability’ and if over-eagerly applied leads to over-abstraction and premature abstraction which does more harm than good.
>> inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability
In other words, the author knows better than you.
The author could have put forward precedent, principles, or examples. But instead he chose to make it about the people (inexperienced), not his arguments.
Before regulations, other engineering disciplines have far more objective decisions and calculations than software engineering.
Consider a mechanical analogue of DRY: choosing between reusing identical parts to make design, assembly and repairs simpler or designing similar but different parts because they are worth optimizing (e.g. a whole IKEA cabinet with interchangeable screws or with short and long ones).
Unlike next month's shifting software requirements the cost and performance of this kind of alternative can be predicted easily and accurately, without involving gut feelings or authority.
Well I think the point is you can’t legislate on things like style, or at least it is pointless to do so and other disciplines don’t try to. DRY is a style guideline.
What you can legislate/codify are procedures, safety and outcomes. So for example building designs must be signed off by a structural engineer and architect, both of whom are liable if the buildings collapses and kills someone. There are standards materials must meet and for which materials can be used. Buildings must meet standards for fire protection, air flow, heat loss etc.
I’m not sure software is at the stage where we even know what to codify or what is good and what is not good.
- I think SW needs much more creativity than other industries.
- Typically SW is not mission critical (in mission critical things, it IS pretty much regulated to uncomfortable extremes)
You could regulate it to death, and would probably have some positive impact by some metric, but you would be easily overtaken by FOSS, where for sure there will be less restrictions.
Those approaches do work with programming, but they don't make use of what makes programming different from other disciplines.
Software is usually quick to write, update and deploy. And errors usually have pretty low impact. Sure, your website may be down for a day and people will get grumpy, but you can hack together a quick fix and have it online with the push of a button.
Compare that to, say, electrical engineering, where there's often a long time between finishing a design and getting a manufactured prototype (let alone mass production.) And a fault could mean damage to equipment (or people) and the cost of having to replace everything. So you'll find that there's a lot more work done up-front and the general way of working tends to be more cautious.
There's also the idea of best practices as a form of communication. This also helps for programmers, as code that looks and acts the way you expect it is easier to follow. But code is primarily shared with other programmers. Other engineering disciplines (more) frequently need to collaborate with people from other domains. For example, a civil engineer's work could be shared with architects, government bureaucrats and construction managers, and best practices often provide a common familiar standard.
Compared to other engineering disciplines, software is a big unorganized mess. But it's also incredibly fast and cheap to make because of that.
You can destroy rockets, lethally irradiate people, fly planes upside down, or financially ruin a company because of software bugs, so avoid faults can be critical for software as well.
It is just that high-velocity low-reliability web and consumer application development is a very large niche. A lot of our best-practices are about attempting to maintain high velocity (often with questionable results), more than increasing reliability.
> It is just that high-velocity low-reliability web and consumer application development is a very large niche
And most of them have no care about the user experience of the end user at all.
Almost every piece of software I have to interact with on a daily basis is absolute garbage. Just full of frustrating bugs that makes most of my day when I'm forced to use a computer absolutely miserable. But to each of the devs it's just a small annoyance in their particular app. Not caring to the end user it's one annoyance that leads to a death by a thousand cuts.
I think one thing the industry does not do properly is applying different practices and standards depending on context.
An retailer website is not the same as a trading platform, the same way that a house is not the same as a railway station. But we blindly try to apply the same "good practices" everywhere.
We also have another interesting phenomenon, our products can mutate in their lifetime, and our practices should follow (they often don't) an MVP can become a critical system, a small internal project can become a client-facing application, we can re-platform, re-write, etc. That's very rare in other industries.
A nit; DRY is probably not what you think it is. DRY is basically the same as SRP, framed differently. In SRP, it's totally valid to have the code twice if it has different meaning from a user pov.
The problem with definition is that it's subjective and cannot be checked automatically. So my definition was about mechanistic DRY, which is objective and checked by linter.
What makes you so sure they do? Go to the hardware store and behold how many fasteners there are. Go down the rabbet hole of pipe fittings. Consider the optimal size of lumber, someday.
And then get ready for the horrors of electrical connections. Not necessarily in how many there are; the real horror is how many think there is a "one true answer" there.
You can find some solace in learning of focusing effects. But, focus isn't just getting harder for individuals. :(
In the end, other engineering areas also have lots of "it depends" situations, where often there are multiple correct answers, depending on availability, legislation, safety, physical constraints, etc.
Perhaps in software engineering people are just too quick or immature to judge.
Often the models and equations rely on making assumptions in order to simplify the problem (cue the joke about physicist and the spherical cow). This is one of the reasons thing are designed with tolerances and safety factors.
Software like CAD and particularly Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) packages can simulate the problem but at least with CFD you would typically perform other types of verification such as wind tunnel tests etc.
I'm not sure that's analogous to "best practices" like "do not repeat yourself (DRY)" or "don't use GOTO". These are little more than stylistic choices that claim to offer more maintainable code. Comparable "best practices" in other engineering fields would be along the lines of "do not chamfer/fillet until the end of modelling" (one I have heard before).
Analyzing a CAD model as you describe is more like running a compiler or type checker on code already written, which is the norm in software too, but is not within in the vein of the topic of discussion.
"Engineering industry" is a misnomer. Other engineering areas have the same issues with best practices we have, industries apply best practices with a great amount of success (but not to totality).
Usually, engineering creates best practices for the industries to follow.
> How other engineering industries deal with this phenomena? Why those approach do not work with programming?
A lot of engineering discipline is a way to prevent engineered works from causing unintentional injury, physical or fiscal.
Most software development is far away from physical injury. And fiscal injury from software failure is rarely assigned to any party.
There's no feedback loop to push us to standardized process to cover our asses; we'd all prefer to do things our own way. It's also pretty hard to do convincing studies to determine which methods are better. Few people are convinced by any of the studies; and there's not been a lot of company X dominates the industry because of practice Y kinds of things, like you see with say Toyota's quality practices in the 80s and 90s.
It occurs to me that the author is explaining his best practice is to look at someone else's best practice with a gimlet eye and take what you want from it. So I wonder how to apply his best practice to his own best practice?
Follow best practices unless you can give a reason not to. "Best practice" is a shorthand for a lot of accumulated knowledge that you don't want to go over again every time. Also following BP makes the code more consistent and thus easier to understand. But when an argument arises, go back to the underpinnings of the best practice and work from there.
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
> Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The unfortunate corollary to this is that all retrogression also depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable person (as defined here) maintains the status quo, for good or ill.
I would reverse this: if you can explain to me exactly why your so called "best practice" applies here and now, good. Otherwise it's a nice input to have in the discussion, but nothing more.
It depends on your risk appetite. A best practice likely keeps you away from pitfalls known to the community of the practice but not to you. It also may keep you away from crafting a solution that is optimal for your specific circumstances not known or applicable more widely.
In high-reward / low-risk environment, such as building an indie turn-based retro-style game, go with your gut feeling unless you have a good reason not to.
In a high-risk / dubious-reward environment, such as implementing cryptography, follow the best practices to a t, unless you know intimately how things work and maybe codified some of the practices.
> A best practice likely keeps you away from pitfalls known to the community of the practice but not to you.
In my experience, many "best practices" are the pitfalls you should be wary about, as they can easily translate into hundreds or thousands of lost hours of work and derail and doom entire projects. (The most annoying part of this is that the real causes won't be found, precisely because "best practices have been followed". Therefore the reputation of the best practice will stay untarnished).
Cryptography on the other hand is a well known example of something you should not touch at all unless you are an absolute expert- that's not even a "best practice" but probably the only reasonable practice.
It's standard practice to install outlets with NEMA connectors in North American buildings. Sure, you could technically swap those out with a more optimal connector that is "better" (one that prevents electricity from flowing while the plug is partially exposed, for example), but using the standard practice is best practice for human-shaped reasons that are often not apparent to early-career engineers.
They wouldn't, but about half of the developers commenting here would do the equivalent of switching from NEMA to something else on the grounds that the something else is better.
There are many like that. Every practice is a trade off.
However, there are many where the cost/benefit ratio is so large that you can default to "you should just do this".
I dont think Id ever look at a company that e.g. had no CI or versioning for a large project for instance and think "they might have had a good reason for this". They didnt.
A lot of the time best practice can also mean “we did it this way last time and it was ok”. I don’t think anyone is saying don’t find improvements in “what is currently defined as best practice” and if they are then that’s your problem.
What if the "best practice" was invented by a VC funded company (like, just for example, Vercel) desperate to maintain their growth trajectory by any means necessary, including huge marketing pushes to convince everybody the "best practice" is the "best way to do things"?
It's downright dangerous to assume a "best practice" in software development somehow automatically means it's some super distilled wisdom juice. A whole lot of it, in my experience, is just hype and rapid, unquestioning cargo culting slamming in right behind the hype.
Use your fucking brain. If the "best practice" is objectively a good solution to your problem then use it. If not, think of something better.
I don't think so. For example, If I'm writing something in a programming language I don't know by heart, I start by following the best practices recommended by the language authors, then start to flex them when they become less useful, until I hit a nice pitfall which these best practices are designed to avoid.
This allows me to start faster, and be in a better shape in short term. Then I can flex advice more and more as I understand how a language works under the hood.
I also read the language tutorial first. But if they don't explain their best practices (and often the explanation is simple), I don't care much for them.
Best practices and such shouldn't be obeyed as "laws" but guidelines for general work. Once in a while there's good reason to avoid / skip them for whatever reason.
The bigger issue is that developers (me included) are usually making the decisions in their own heads. Usually the reasons are quite ok but they are not really said out loud or documented.
I've been stumbled upon this as both developer trying to get their code approved and when doing a code review.
For the developer it feels super annoying that somebody nitpicks about things which the developer has probably gone through in their heads already and ended up with the resulting solution. Just like Martin in the post complains and reacts passive aggressively towards reviewers mentioning these things.
For the code reviewer it feels like the developer is being sloppy or doesn't care about our common way of doing things thus increasing the need to nitpick and explain so that the developer understands how it should be done.
The solution for this is actually quite easy: document in the comments and in the Pull Request _why_ you're breaking team's / company's guidelines and why you think it's warranted for solution for this case. This seems to remove quite a lot of friction.
Oh and of course it doesn't mean that the guidelines should be broken all the time just because one thinks this kind of stuff is for "idiots|assholes". When working as a team, we need to adhere to common way of working for most of the time.
While I guess most would agree all the cited practices have been abused what is really the alternative? Absence of practices does not make things better - history has plenty lessons there. To run medium to large scale projects one needs patterns to ease communication and integration.
The real question is how do we prevent best practices to be perverted and I fear the answer is having the right people in the right places. The one best practice to rule them all: Have knowledgeable balanced people who know when to break the rules.
The alternative is to accept that every solution has drawbacks and trade-offs. Best practices were an attempt to codify design standards that would be equivalent to "buying IBM" in the sense of the old phrase, "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM."
That was always a bad idea. Often the best choice in one context would be a bad choice in other contexts. You don't want an engineer in a 20-person startup making decisions like they're at Google, or vice-versa. You have to take responsibility for deciding what's best for a particular problem in a particular context, without looking for the cover of "everybody does it this way."
Perhaps it's due to the very large number of factors in a code base and/or the particular problem space.
But as I got more senior, when asked by less experienced developers the best way to do something, my answers tended to increasingly start with: "Well, it depends...".
And that's the thing, there is no universal best practice for everything, there are solutions which are more often than not good enough, but as all solutions tend to be a trade off favouring a particular scenario over another, sometimes they're also highly inappropriate to the particular circumstances.
Another term for someone trying to blindly apply supposed best practices is "cargo culting".
In summary, there is lot's nuance to software development and the particular circumstances it's being applied to meaning that you need to understand the trade offs of particular solutions to see which one makes the most sense for a particular situation.
There are 2 main kinds of advice that get labeled best practices in an attempt at persuasion:
1. Advice which worked in one situation - “we tried Agile, everyone should use it!”
2. Proven stuff like code review, which you call best practices when begging your org to implement it: “please let’s do it, I can clearly see how this will improve our org.”
These 2 examples represent locations on a spectrum: let’s call it “provenness”.
The author’s problem boils down to subjectivity - everyone positions different practices in different places on the provenness axis. The upshot of that is when one person says “we should do this, it’s obvious and/or it’ll definitely help” another person hears “we tried it once, you should try it too!” and then everyone has a bad time.
Then it gets confounded by everyone calling everything best practices - no matter how long ago or unproven the practices might be.
What would be handy is some generally agreed-upon yardsticks for graduating practices into or out of best practices status, plus better terminology to cover the spectrum of provenness so more sophisticated discussions can be had that account for the nuance and we don’t all talk past each other..
But then analyst companies wouldn’t get to make their glossy 2x2 charts, so it probably won’t happen.
>There is something wrong with people who enjoy telling other people what to do.
Telling other people what to do is human's favorite thing. Give a man an opportunity to make and/or enforce rules, and you have a very happy man. People dedicate their whole lives to reaching stage after stage in their rule-making game.
Best practices are tough for practices where the foundations are not stable. And with programming, we have trouble defining the foundations. Much less stabilizing them.
And note I don't mean stable as in, not crashing. I mean it as not changing.
For a while, this was doable with java. For its warts, it gave a good foundation. Industry practice got caught up in start up enthusiasm, though, and that went out the window.
Similar could probably be said for Windows. I was not a fan of its model, but it provided a stable base for business apps for a long time.
The name “best practices” kind of implies that they actually are practiced somewhere. So it’s different from theoretical abstract ideas “how we should write software”, which maybe nobody follows.
Maybe if people didn't follow best practices their software would be terrible-er? Guardrails for hard things doesn't imply no guardrails would make it easier.
"Postel's law" is an ironic name, I don't think the people who coined that term meant that it was an infallible rule of the universe, just what seemed a good rule of thumb for implementing protocols.
I still like Postel's law, but don't imagine for a second it's a 'law' with the kind of authority the article implies, and didn't enjoy the article's slime about people who like it!
Best practices are a way to avoid building everything up from first principles every time. They are more, “here are rules that are generally applicable so you don’t have to waste time thinking,” vs “here are laws of god which are always applicable.”
It is an error to throw out every best practice and reconsider everything just as it is to blindly follow the best practices.
IMO it’s best to apply the best practices by default and question them as they are used. Essentially trust but verify. Assuming they are right most of the time you get the benefit of speed. Assuming some of them are wrong, it still leaves room to course correct.
I've seen (and started using) "current common practices" instead of "best practices" where it makes sense.
In an always-evolving technology landscape, it feels like a better representation of what we're doing, and it helps prevent the kind of dogmatic stubbornness that forms around the word "best".
The problem is that a lot of true things in the world are counter-intuitive. So insisting that all the rules "make sense" in an immediate way is clearly a non-starter. In the safety industry there are many examples of best practices that are bred from experience but end up being counter-intuitive to some. For instance, it might not make intuitive sense that a pilot who has gone through a take-off procedure thousands of times needs a checklist to remember all the steps, but we know that it actually helps.
It's hard because there is usually some information loss in summarisation, but we also have limited memory, so we can't really expect people to remember every case study that led to the distilled advice.
As a chemical engineer by training, though, I have constantly been amazed at how resistant software people are to the idea that their industry could benefit from the kind of standardisation that has improved my industry so much.
It will never happen outside of limited industries because it would appear to be a loss of "freedom". I think the current situation creates an illusory anarchist freedom of informality that leads to sometimes proprietary lock-in, vulnerabilities, bugs, incompatibility churn, poorly-prioritized feature development, and tyranny of chaos and tech debt.
There are too many languages, too many tools, too many (conflicting) conventions (especially ones designed by committee), and too many options.
Having systems, tools, and components that don't change often with respect to compatibility and are formally-verifiable far beyond the rigor of seL4 such that they are (basically) without (implementation) error would be valuable over having tools lack even basic testing or self-tests, lack digital signatures that would prove chain-of-custody, and being able to model and prove a program or library to a level such that its behavior can be completely checked far more deeply in "whitebox" and "blackbox" methods for correctness would prove that some code stand the test of time. By choosing lesser numbers of standard language(s), tool(s), and component(s) it makes it cheaper and easier to attempt to do such.
Maybe in 100 years, out of necessity, there will be essentially 1 programming language that dominates all others (power law distribution) for humans, and it will be some sort of formal behavioral model specification language that an LLM will generate tests and machine code to implement, manage, and test against.
I disagree slightly here. There may be one (1) dominant formal language that's used as the glue code that gets run on machines and verified, but it will have numerous font-end languages that compile into it, for ease of typing and abstraction/domain fit.
Who drove that standardization in chemical engineering?
I ask, because the intra-organizational dynamics of software have been ugly for standardization. Vendor lock-in, submarine patents, embrace-and-extend, etc. have meant naive adoption of "best practices" meant a one-way ticket to an expensive, obsolete system, with an eventually insolvent vendor.
That's an interesting question. I guess it's partly the fact that chemical industry is very large-scale, often with one company in charge (think Shell or Total). The realities of having one organisation in charge of many large operations across many countries probably gives higher reward on standardisation. This is a bit like coding to "Google style guidelines" or whatever. The big organisation has more incentive to fund standardisation, but the small people can benefit from that effort, too.
The magnitude of impact also means that many industrial plants fall under government regulation, and in the safety field specifically there is a lot of knowledge sharing.
I think there is also a component about the inflexibility of real matter that factors into this. It's much harder to attach two incorrectly sized pipes together than it is to write a software shim, so the standardisation of pipe sizes and gets pushed up to the original manufacturers, where it also happens to be more economical to produce lots of exact copies than individually crafted parts.
I think the rejection is too strong in this article. The idea of, “best practices,” comes from an established Body of Knowledge. There is one published for software development called the SoftWare Engineering Body of Knowledge or SWEBOK; published by the IEEE.
The author seems to be arguing for nuance: that these “laws,” require context and shouldn’t be applied blindly. I agree.
However they shouldn’t be rejected out of hand either and people recommending them aren’t idiots.
Update: one problem with “best practices,” that I think the article might have unwittingly implied is that most software developers aren’t aware of SWEBOK and are repeating maxims and aphorisms they heard from others. Software development is often powered by folklore and hand waving.
> In 2016, the IEEE Computer Society kicked off the SWEBOK Evolution effort to develop future iterations of the body of knowledge. The SWEBOK Evolution project resulted in the publication of SWEBOK Guide version 4 in October 2024.
So the thing called "SWEBOK Guide" is actually the reference text for SWEBOK.
The books that encode some standardized Xbok are always named "The guide to the Xbok".
The actual BOK isn't supposed to have a concrete representation. It's not supposed to be standardized either, but standard organizations always ignore that part.
Well, literally the "state" as in what is the knowledge that everybody shares. We usually call that by something closer to "minimum common denominator".
What people usually call "state of the art" is the best knowledge that is reasonably well known. That is out of scope. If you take a look on this one, it's full of stuff that we knew not to use on the 20th century. This is typical.
I think it is best to strongly reject the idea "best practices will always benefit you".
Most best practices that I have been told about were low local maxima at best, and very harmful at worst.
If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it.
It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason (not a "just so" explanation that skips several steps).
I don't think anyone has ever thought that best practices will always benefit you. Nothing always works every single time in every single case.
This whole thing is really silly and obvious.
Of course you shouldn't blindly follow advice without thinking. But not following advice just because it might not always be right is also a bad idea.
My advice: In general, you should follow good advice from experienced people. If enough experts say this is the best way to do something, you should probably do that, most of the time.
But that advice will never trend on HN because it isn't clickbait or extreme, and requires using your noggin.
> I don't think anyone has ever thought that best practices will always benefit you.
Whenever a "best practice" or "convention" has been presented to me, that is how it has been framed. (...it is best practice, therefore, it will definitely benefit you to follow it)
I do not know what context this happened to you in, but in the context of building something quickly, learning, while not being an expert in an area, best practice are a common crutch.
In many work places either they do not have time or at least think they do have time to think things through 100% for themselves from first principles so they depend on best practices instead.
That makes sense to me and I would expect better results on average with using best practices than rejection of best practices in the above context.
That said I try to work on things where I am not always in the above context, where thinking things through end to end provides a competitive advantage.
100%… a best practice in other traditional engineering practices help us work within the state of the art. They’re the accumulated wisdom and experience of engineers that came before us.
There are plenty of them that help us write concurrent code that avoids common deadlock situations without having to resort to writing proofs every time. Someone already did the work and condensed it down into a rule to follow. Even if you don’t understand the underlying proof you can follow the rule and hope that everything will shake out.
What I find we struggle most with is knowing when we actually need to write the proof. Sometimes we bias ourselves towards best practices and intuition when working it out formally would be more prudent.
> Most best practices that I have been told about were low local maxima at best, and very harmful at worst.
This matches my experience, though sometimes they indeed will be helpful, at least after some consideration.
> If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it.
In certain environments this will get you labeled someone who doesn't want to create quality software, because obviously best practices will lead to good code and not wanting to follow those practices or questioning them means that you don't have enough experience or something. Ergo, you should just apply SOLID and DRY everywhere, even if it becomes more or less a cargo cult. Not that I agree with the idea, but that way of thinking is prevalent.
(not that I agree with that, people just have that mindset sometimes)
> It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason (not a "just so" explanation that skips several steps).
If everyone follows that then every decision will be bikeshedded to death. I think part of the point of the concept of "best practices" is that some ideas should be at least somewhat entrenched, followed by default, and not overturned without good reason.
Ideally your records of best practices would include a rationale and scope for when they should be reexamined. But trying to reason everything out from first principles doesn't work great either.
Well calling something a bikeshed is implicitly claiming that it's not so important. Often the specific choice is not very important, but making a choice rather than not making one is important. And while an effective organisation would not allow important decisionmaking to get derailed, many organisations are ineffective.
I definitely sympathize with the thrust of the article. I think the reality is somewhere in the middle: best practices are useful short-cuts and people aren't always idiots for suggesting them. I've worked with folks who insist on Postel's law despite security research in recent years that suggest parsers should be strict to prevent langsec attacks, for example. In those cases I would refute leniency...
Although I also do work in fintech and well... card payment systems are messy. The legal framework covers liability for when actors send bad data but your system still has to parse/process/accept those messages. So you need some leniency.
It does drive me up the wall sometimes when people will hand-wave away details and cite maxims or best-practices... but those are usually situations where the details matter a great deal: security, safety, liveness, etc. People generally have the best intentions in these scenarios and I don't fault them for having different experience/knowledge/wisdom that lead them to different conclusions than I do. They're not idiots for suggesting best practices... it's just a nuisance.
That's what I mean about the rejection being too strong. It should be considered that best practices are often useful and helpful. We don't have to re-develop our intuitions from first principles on every project. It would be tedious to do so. But a healthy dose of skepticism should be used... especially when it comes to Postel's Law which has some decent research to suggest avoiding it.
SWEBOK seems the opposite of that. A body of knowledge is not at all the same thing as a best practice. The only unapologetic best practice in SWEBOK is that professionals should be familiar with every topic in SWEBOK. Definitely not that you _should_ do everything in the book.
The book is quite sophisticated in this. It explicitly separate the technical knowledge from the judgments of which, when, and where to apply it. Most occurrences of "best practices" in the text are quoted, and are references to other works and describe the need to choose between different best-practice libraries depending on context. Others are part of a meta-conversation about the role of standards in engineering. Very little of SWEBOK is promoted as a "best practice" in itself.
Here's a quote from SWEBOK v4, 12-5
> Foremost, software engineers should know the key software engineering standards that apply to their specific industry. As Iberle discussed [19], the practices software engineers use vary greatly depending on the industry, business model and organizational culture where they work.
In my view best practices emerge from a body of knowledge (or sometimes from the practice and wisdom of others that haven't been documented/accepted/etc yet) and are "shortcuts."
I'm not defending Postel's Law; I agree that, after years of practice and research, it leads to security issues and surprises.
However, the point is that these kinds of principles don't arise out of people's heads and become accepted wisdom for nothing; they're usually built off of an implied (or explicit) body of knowledge.
Sure. Best practices develop by choosing practices to match your context out of a defined body of knowledge.
But SWEBOK is very clear that "best practices" are context specific - they are radically different forces and solutions in video games as compared to chemical engineering control systems. There's no such thing as a "best practice" absent a context. The footnotes in SWEBOK point off in a million directions saying "go look over there for best practices for YOUR context".
To put it simply, best practices are, at best, context-dependent. Best practices for avionics software are not the same as best practices for a CRUD form on your mailing-list signup page.
And to be fair, the best practices for designing a bridge or a skyscraper are not the same ones for designing a doghouse.
This! "Best practice" depends on the circumstances. Are "micro services" a best practice? What about "monolithic architecture"? Those choices are not best practices in and of themselves but may be best practices when considering organization/dev team size, application user count, computational demands on the application/system, etc. What are the goals and vision of the future? Let's future-proof and pre-optimize for problems we don't currently have nor will likely have! (And don't get me started on the number of folks that dream about "we're going to need to be able to scale!" for a fairly simple CRUD app that will most likely be used by hundreads, maybe thousands, or users and realistically need 100's of "simple" requests per second (most likely per minute... )
> but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2) inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability,
The author might go on to make other points that are worth discussing, but lays out his supporting arguments clearly in the opening paragraph. Best practices do not necessarily do harm because they offer bad advice, they do harm because they are advocated for by zealots and the inexperienced.
My first reaction is how unfortunate it is that this particular developer has found himself in the presence of bad engineers and the inexperienced.
But then, the argument is automatically self-defeating. Why is the rest of the article even worth reading, if he states upfront what his arguments are and those arguments are very easy to refute?
It is deeply irrational to judge the merits of an idea based solely on who is advocating for that idea.
My advice to the author is to reflect on the types of positions that he accepts, the ones that have him so put off by the people that he works with that he is openly writing about abandoning what he admits could be sound engineering practice, solely based on who that advice is coming from and how it is being delivered.
Developing software is complicated. It is constant problem solving. When solutions to problems come about, and we abstract those solutions, it is quite easy for individuals to misapply the abstraction to an inappropriate concrete. To drop context and try to retrofit a lousy solution because that solution was appropriate to a slightly different problem. But at the end of the day, these abstractions exist to try and simplify the process. Any time you see a "best practice" or design pattern acting as a complicating force, it is not doing its job. At that point you can either be objective and exercise some professional curiosity in order to try and understand why the solution adopted is inappropriate ... or you can take the lazy way out and just assume that "best practices" are the opinions of zealots and the inexperienced who blindly follow because they don't know any better.
we don't have to give undue value to 'best practices', nor do we need to judge an idea based on its presenter. we just need to have a reasonable discussion about the idea in the context in which its being applied. this simple approach has been largely eclipsed in the industry by the fetishization tools, and the absurd notion that whole classes of approaches can be dismissed as being 'antipattern'.
It's not very hard to weigh a suggestion. speculate about its costs, benefits and risks.
> Best practices do not necessarily do harm because they offer bad advice, they do harm because they are advocated for by zealots and the inexperienced.
I think the point is that blindly suggesting "best practices" often is bad advice.
It's a common form of bikeshedding—it allows someone to give their casual two cents without doing the hard work of thinking through the tradeoffs.
I think the problem is that a lot of computer nerds are a bit OCD and like to apply one solution to everything. You see this with how they get crazy about strictly typed versus not strictly typed, one particular language for every application, or spaces vs tabs. I was like that when I was younger but as I get older I realized the world is the complex place and has programs have to deal with the real world there is no one solution fits all, or a best practice that always applies. To become good at programming you need to be adaptable to the problem space. Best practices are great for juniors once you've got a bit of experience you should use that instead.
My job revolves around adopting software solutions to solve practical problems and let me tell you, this mentality of one solution to everything goes beyond just the coding. I've encountered countless developers that seems to believe that the reality of a business should conform itself to how the developer believes your business/industry should operate.
Funny, my experience is the opposite. When I was younger I thought there was a time and place for everything, a right tool for the job, a need to carefully consider the circumstances. As I got older I realised that actually a lot of libraries, languages, and communities are simply bad, and an experienced programmer is better served by having a deep knowledge of a handful of good tools and applying them to everything.
“Best practices” have nothing to do with engineering. They are a marketing concept. They are a kind marketing better known as bullying.
In every case where you want to say “best practice” there is a better alternative, which is to say “practice.” The concept of best is never needed or warranted, because practices are not subject to rigorous testing and review.
I have been an independent consultant and trainer since 1999 and not once have I taught or recommended a best practice.
I do have many opinions. I call them: opinions. I think my opinions are the best, but I can’t think of any reason that anyone else beyond my wife and dog should think so.
I can sense the hackles rising. The arcane magi of the Guidance Council have scried a rebel wizard in their orb. Every cantrip and charm must be uttered at once, with maximal urgency! Invoke the spirits of the tomes!!!
The author sounds like even though they have read extensively about various "best" practices, they did not really gain an understanding of the tradeoffs involved with each one.
> “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) is basically good advice, but sometimes just copy/pasting things is just the more pragmatic thing to do, and not really a big deal.
Duplicating code on purpose is not about being pragmatic, it's about recognizing when DRY would violate the single responsibility principle.
The ability to weigh tradeoffs in context is what makes some engineers better than others.
The problem with DRY is that it is expressed incorrectly and misleadingly. There is little inherent benefit in avoiding code duplication, and it can do harm when done for the wrong reasons. The actual context is change management. Will the copy of the code likely have to change in the same way as the original? Only then should duplication be avoided. The rule taken literally fails to convey this important precondition and the reasoning behind it. (And so does WET.)
> The author sounds like even though they have read extensively about various "best" practices, they did not really gain an understanding of the tradeoffs involved with each one.
It sounds to me like they did understand the tradeoffs. But that they were being brow-beaten to apply "best practices" that were inapplicable because of the tradeoffs.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadFor example I think that strict formatting is a good thing. Since I tried to use Prettier I'm using it and similar tools everywhere and I like it. I can't do vertical alignment anymore, it eats empty lines sometimes, but that's a good compromise.
May be there should be a good compromise when it comes to "best practices"? Like "DRY" is not always best, but it's always good enough, so extract common stuff every time, even if you feel it's not worth it.
I often deal with this dilemma when writing Java with default Idea inspections. They highlight duplicated code and now I need to either disable this inspection in some way or extract the chunk of code that I don't really think should be extracted, but I just can do it and move on...
I think we're more like Pythagoras: some useful theory about numbers, taken way too far and became an actual religion[0] listening to the Delphic[1] Oracle[2].
[0] Tabs or spaces? Vi or emacs? Is the singularity the rapture of the nerds, with Roko's Basalisk as the devil and ${insert name here according to personal taste} as the antichrist? SOLID or move fast and break things?
vs. really a real religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism
[1] Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)
but rather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi
[2] Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation
but rather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle
DRY is a perfect example though of something which in moderation is a good idea but as the article says is vulnerable to ‘inexperienced programmers who lack the ability to judge the applicability’ and if over-eagerly applied leads to over-abstraction and premature abstraction which does more harm than good.
In other words, the author knows better than you.
The author could have put forward precedent, principles, or examples. But instead he chose to make it about the people (inexperienced), not his arguments.
What you can legislate/codify are procedures, safety and outcomes. So for example building designs must be signed off by a structural engineer and architect, both of whom are liable if the buildings collapses and kills someone. There are standards materials must meet and for which materials can be used. Buildings must meet standards for fire protection, air flow, heat loss etc.
I’m not sure software is at the stage where we even know what to codify or what is good and what is not good.
- I think SW needs much more creativity than other industries.
- Typically SW is not mission critical (in mission critical things, it IS pretty much regulated to uncomfortable extremes)
You could regulate it to death, and would probably have some positive impact by some metric, but you would be easily overtaken by FOSS, where for sure there will be less restrictions.
Software is usually quick to write, update and deploy. And errors usually have pretty low impact. Sure, your website may be down for a day and people will get grumpy, but you can hack together a quick fix and have it online with the push of a button.
Compare that to, say, electrical engineering, where there's often a long time between finishing a design and getting a manufactured prototype (let alone mass production.) And a fault could mean damage to equipment (or people) and the cost of having to replace everything. So you'll find that there's a lot more work done up-front and the general way of working tends to be more cautious.
There's also the idea of best practices as a form of communication. This also helps for programmers, as code that looks and acts the way you expect it is easier to follow. But code is primarily shared with other programmers. Other engineering disciplines (more) frequently need to collaborate with people from other domains. For example, a civil engineer's work could be shared with architects, government bureaucrats and construction managers, and best practices often provide a common familiar standard.
Compared to other engineering disciplines, software is a big unorganized mess. But it's also incredibly fast and cheap to make because of that.
It is just that high-velocity low-reliability web and consumer application development is a very large niche. A lot of our best-practices are about attempting to maintain high velocity (often with questionable results), more than increasing reliability.
And most of them have no care about the user experience of the end user at all.
Almost every piece of software I have to interact with on a daily basis is absolute garbage. Just full of frustrating bugs that makes most of my day when I'm forced to use a computer absolutely miserable. But to each of the devs it's just a small annoyance in their particular app. Not caring to the end user it's one annoyance that leads to a death by a thousand cuts.
Software is just atrocious nowadays.
An retailer website is not the same as a trading platform, the same way that a house is not the same as a railway station. But we blindly try to apply the same "good practices" everywhere.
We also have another interesting phenomenon, our products can mutate in their lifetime, and our practices should follow (they often don't) an MVP can become a critical system, a small internal project can become a client-facing application, we can re-platform, re-write, etc. That's very rare in other industries.
(https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2207...)
"Byte for byte equivalent" doesn't necessarily mean it's a copy, if the semantics of it are different.
And then get ready for the horrors of electrical connections. Not necessarily in how many there are; the real horror is how many think there is a "one true answer" there.
You can find some solace in learning of focusing effects. But, focus isn't just getting harder for individuals. :(
In the end, other engineering areas also have lots of "it depends" situations, where often there are multiple correct answers, depending on availability, legislation, safety, physical constraints, etc.
Perhaps in software engineering people are just too quick or immature to judge.
> rabbet hole
Nice pun ;)
They don't. CAD, the "programming languages" of most other engineering disciplines, is as much of a Wild West.
or Heat Exchanger efficiency calculations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_mean_temperature_d...) etc.
Often the models and equations rely on making assumptions in order to simplify the problem (cue the joke about physicist and the spherical cow). This is one of the reasons thing are designed with tolerances and safety factors.
Software like CAD and particularly Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) packages can simulate the problem but at least with CFD you would typically perform other types of verification such as wind tunnel tests etc.
Analyzing a CAD model as you describe is more like running a compiler or type checker on code already written, which is the norm in software too, but is not within in the vein of the topic of discussion.
Usually, engineering creates best practices for the industries to follow.
A lot of engineering discipline is a way to prevent engineered works from causing unintentional injury, physical or fiscal.
Most software development is far away from physical injury. And fiscal injury from software failure is rarely assigned to any party.
There's no feedback loop to push us to standardized process to cover our asses; we'd all prefer to do things our own way. It's also pretty hard to do convincing studies to determine which methods are better. Few people are convinced by any of the studies; and there's not been a lot of company X dominates the industry because of practice Y kinds of things, like you see with say Toyota's quality practices in the 80s and 90s.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’
The unfortunate corollary to this is that all retrogression also depends on the unreasonable man. The reasonable person (as defined here) maintains the status quo, for good or ill.
In high-reward / low-risk environment, such as building an indie turn-based retro-style game, go with your gut feeling unless you have a good reason not to.
In a high-risk / dubious-reward environment, such as implementing cryptography, follow the best practices to a t, unless you know intimately how things work and maybe codified some of the practices.
There is a wide gamut between these two extremes.
In my experience, many "best practices" are the pitfalls you should be wary about, as they can easily translate into hundreds or thousands of lost hours of work and derail and doom entire projects. (The most annoying part of this is that the real causes won't be found, precisely because "best practices have been followed". Therefore the reputation of the best practice will stay untarnished).
Cryptography on the other hand is a well known example of something you should not touch at all unless you are an absolute expert- that's not even a "best practice" but probably the only reasonable practice.
It's standard practice to install outlets with NEMA connectors in North American buildings. Sure, you could technically swap those out with a more optimal connector that is "better" (one that prevents electricity from flowing while the plug is partially exposed, for example), but using the standard practice is best practice for human-shaped reasons that are often not apparent to early-career engineers.
However, there are many where the cost/benefit ratio is so large that you can default to "you should just do this".
I dont think Id ever look at a company that e.g. had no CI or versioning for a large project for instance and think "they might have had a good reason for this". They didnt.
A lot of the time best practice can also mean “we did it this way last time and it was ok”. I don’t think anyone is saying don’t find improvements in “what is currently defined as best practice” and if they are then that’s your problem.
It's downright dangerous to assume a "best practice" in software development somehow automatically means it's some super distilled wisdom juice. A whole lot of it, in my experience, is just hype and rapid, unquestioning cargo culting slamming in right behind the hype.
Use your fucking brain. If the "best practice" is objectively a good solution to your problem then use it. If not, think of something better.
...or,
The best practice of best practices is vetting the source of the best practice to verify its authenticity.
No?
Cargo culting much?
I'd say, follow best practices only if you can say exactly why it is best practice.
This allows me to start faster, and be in a better shape in short term. Then I can flex advice more and more as I understand how a language works under the hood.
[0]: https://go.dev/doc/modules/layout
The bigger issue is that developers (me included) are usually making the decisions in their own heads. Usually the reasons are quite ok but they are not really said out loud or documented.
I've been stumbled upon this as both developer trying to get their code approved and when doing a code review.
For the developer it feels super annoying that somebody nitpicks about things which the developer has probably gone through in their heads already and ended up with the resulting solution. Just like Martin in the post complains and reacts passive aggressively towards reviewers mentioning these things.
For the code reviewer it feels like the developer is being sloppy or doesn't care about our common way of doing things thus increasing the need to nitpick and explain so that the developer understands how it should be done.
The solution for this is actually quite easy: document in the comments and in the Pull Request _why_ you're breaking team's / company's guidelines and why you think it's warranted for solution for this case. This seems to remove quite a lot of friction.
Oh and of course it doesn't mean that the guidelines should be broken all the time just because one thinks this kind of stuff is for "idiots|assholes". When working as a team, we need to adhere to common way of working for most of the time.
The real question is how do we prevent best practices to be perverted and I fear the answer is having the right people in the right places. The one best practice to rule them all: Have knowledgeable balanced people who know when to break the rules.
That was always a bad idea. Often the best choice in one context would be a bad choice in other contexts. You don't want an engineer in a 20-person startup making decisions like they're at Google, or vice-versa. You have to take responsibility for deciding what's best for a particular problem in a particular context, without looking for the cover of "everybody does it this way."
But as I got more senior, when asked by less experienced developers the best way to do something, my answers tended to increasingly start with: "Well, it depends...".
And that's the thing, there is no universal best practice for everything, there are solutions which are more often than not good enough, but as all solutions tend to be a trade off favouring a particular scenario over another, sometimes they're also highly inappropriate to the particular circumstances.
Another term for someone trying to blindly apply supposed best practices is "cargo culting".
In summary, there is lot's nuance to software development and the particular circumstances it's being applied to meaning that you need to understand the trade offs of particular solutions to see which one makes the most sense for a particular situation.
1. Advice which worked in one situation - “we tried Agile, everyone should use it!”
2. Proven stuff like code review, which you call best practices when begging your org to implement it: “please let’s do it, I can clearly see how this will improve our org.”
These 2 examples represent locations on a spectrum: let’s call it “provenness”.
The author’s problem boils down to subjectivity - everyone positions different practices in different places on the provenness axis. The upshot of that is when one person says “we should do this, it’s obvious and/or it’ll definitely help” another person hears “we tried it once, you should try it too!” and then everyone has a bad time.
Then it gets confounded by everyone calling everything best practices - no matter how long ago or unproven the practices might be.
What would be handy is some generally agreed-upon yardsticks for graduating practices into or out of best practices status, plus better terminology to cover the spectrum of provenness so more sophisticated discussions can be had that account for the nuance and we don’t all talk past each other..
But then analyst companies wouldn’t get to make their glossy 2x2 charts, so it probably won’t happen.
Only in the last one you can either understand the reason, or ignore the rule because it doesn't apply to your situation.
Telling other people what to do is human's favorite thing. Give a man an opportunity to make and/or enforce rules, and you have a very happy man. People dedicate their whole lives to reaching stage after stage in their rule-making game.
And note I don't mean stable as in, not crashing. I mean it as not changing.
For a while, this was doable with java. For its warts, it gave a good foundation. Industry practice got caught up in start up enthusiasm, though, and that went out the window.
Similar could probably be said for Windows. I was not a fan of its model, but it provided a stable base for business apps for a long time.
If we can agree that most large, financially successful software projects are of questionable quality, then either
- they used best practices and yet they still suck, OR
- they did not use best practices, but are widely successful anyway.
So no matter how you look at it, software best practices just haven't panned out.
I still like Postel's law, but don't imagine for a second it's a 'law' with the kind of authority the article implies, and didn't enjoy the article's slime about people who like it!
It is an error to throw out every best practice and reconsider everything just as it is to blindly follow the best practices.
IMO it’s best to apply the best practices by default and question them as they are used. Essentially trust but verify. Assuming they are right most of the time you get the benefit of speed. Assuming some of them are wrong, it still leaves room to course correct.
In an always-evolving technology landscape, it feels like a better representation of what we're doing, and it helps prevent the kind of dogmatic stubbornness that forms around the word "best".
The problem is that a lot of true things in the world are counter-intuitive. So insisting that all the rules "make sense" in an immediate way is clearly a non-starter. In the safety industry there are many examples of best practices that are bred from experience but end up being counter-intuitive to some. For instance, it might not make intuitive sense that a pilot who has gone through a take-off procedure thousands of times needs a checklist to remember all the steps, but we know that it actually helps.
It's hard because there is usually some information loss in summarisation, but we also have limited memory, so we can't really expect people to remember every case study that led to the distilled advice.
As a chemical engineer by training, though, I have constantly been amazed at how resistant software people are to the idea that their industry could benefit from the kind of standardisation that has improved my industry so much.
There are too many languages, too many tools, too many (conflicting) conventions (especially ones designed by committee), and too many options.
Having systems, tools, and components that don't change often with respect to compatibility and are formally-verifiable far beyond the rigor of seL4 such that they are (basically) without (implementation) error would be valuable over having tools lack even basic testing or self-tests, lack digital signatures that would prove chain-of-custody, and being able to model and prove a program or library to a level such that its behavior can be completely checked far more deeply in "whitebox" and "blackbox" methods for correctness would prove that some code stand the test of time. By choosing lesser numbers of standard language(s), tool(s), and component(s) it makes it cheaper and easier to attempt to do such.
Maybe in 100 years, out of necessity, there will be essentially 1 programming language that dominates all others (power law distribution) for humans, and it will be some sort of formal behavioral model specification language that an LLM will generate tests and machine code to implement, manage, and test against.
I ask, because the intra-organizational dynamics of software have been ugly for standardization. Vendor lock-in, submarine patents, embrace-and-extend, etc. have meant naive adoption of "best practices" meant a one-way ticket to an expensive, obsolete system, with an eventually insolvent vendor.
The magnitude of impact also means that many industrial plants fall under government regulation, and in the safety field specifically there is a lot of knowledge sharing.
I think there is also a component about the inflexibility of real matter that factors into this. It's much harder to attach two incorrectly sized pipes together than it is to write a software shim, so the standardisation of pipe sizes and gets pushed up to the original manufacturers, where it also happens to be more economical to produce lots of exact copies than individually crafted parts.
I suspect we would have a defined Software Engineering profession if there were only a few dozen vertically integrated firms.
The author seems to be arguing for nuance: that these “laws,” require context and shouldn’t be applied blindly. I agree.
However they shouldn’t be rejected out of hand either and people recommending them aren’t idiots.
Update: one problem with “best practices,” that I think the article might have unwittingly implied is that most software developers aren’t aware of SWEBOK and are repeating maxims and aphorisms they heard from others. Software development is often powered by folklore and hand waving.
https://ieeecs-media.computer.org/media/education/swebok/swe...
But, you know, I want the whole ordeal. I want the SWEBOK, not the "how to read the SWEBOK". Where can I find it?
> In 2016, the IEEE Computer Society kicked off the SWEBOK Evolution effort to develop future iterations of the body of knowledge. The SWEBOK Evolution project resulted in the publication of SWEBOK Guide version 4 in October 2024.
So the thing called "SWEBOK Guide" is actually the reference text for SWEBOK.
The actual BOK isn't supposed to have a concrete representation. It's not supposed to be standardized either, but standard organizations always ignore that part.
What people usually call "state of the art" is the best knowledge that is reasonably well known. That is out of scope. If you take a look on this one, it's full of stuff that we knew not to use on the 20th century. This is typical.
Most best practices that I have been told about were low local maxima at best, and very harmful at worst.
If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it.
It might still be a good idea, but you shouldn't seriously consider it until you hear an actually convincing reason (not a "just so" explanation that skips several steps).
This whole thing is really silly and obvious.
Of course you shouldn't blindly follow advice without thinking. But not following advice just because it might not always be right is also a bad idea.
My advice: In general, you should follow good advice from experienced people. If enough experts say this is the best way to do something, you should probably do that, most of the time.
But that advice will never trend on HN because it isn't clickbait or extreme, and requires using your noggin.
Whenever a "best practice" or "convention" has been presented to me, that is how it has been framed. (...it is best practice, therefore, it will definitely benefit you to follow it)
In many work places either they do not have time or at least think they do have time to think things through 100% for themselves from first principles so they depend on best practices instead.
That makes sense to me and I would expect better results on average with using best practices than rejection of best practices in the above context.
That said I try to work on things where I am not always in the above context, where thinking things through end to end provides a competitive advantage.
There are plenty of them that help us write concurrent code that avoids common deadlock situations without having to resort to writing proofs every time. Someone already did the work and condensed it down into a rule to follow. Even if you don’t understand the underlying proof you can follow the rule and hope that everything will shake out.
What I find we struggle most with is knowing when we actually need to write the proof. Sometimes we bias ourselves towards best practices and intuition when working it out formally would be more prudent.
It’d be ideal if you could identify when it doesn’t work. But in the absense of that applying it everywhere is still a net positive.
This matches my experience, though sometimes they indeed will be helpful, at least after some consideration.
> If someone quotes a best practice to you and can't cite a convincing "why", you should immediately reject it.
In certain environments this will get you labeled someone who doesn't want to create quality software, because obviously best practices will lead to good code and not wanting to follow those practices or questioning them means that you don't have enough experience or something. Ergo, you should just apply SOLID and DRY everywhere, even if it becomes more or less a cargo cult. Not that I agree with the idea, but that way of thinking is prevalent.
(not that I agree with that, people just have that mindset sometimes)
Never mind that AWS recommends what is good for AWS, not us.
If everyone follows that then every decision will be bikeshedded to death. I think part of the point of the concept of "best practices" is that some ideas should be at least somewhat entrenched, followed by default, and not overturned without good reason.
Ideally your records of best practices would include a rationale and scope for when they should be reexamined. But trying to reason everything out from first principles doesn't work great either.
Although I also do work in fintech and well... card payment systems are messy. The legal framework covers liability for when actors send bad data but your system still has to parse/process/accept those messages. So you need some leniency.
It does drive me up the wall sometimes when people will hand-wave away details and cite maxims or best-practices... but those are usually situations where the details matter a great deal: security, safety, liveness, etc. People generally have the best intentions in these scenarios and I don't fault them for having different experience/knowledge/wisdom that lead them to different conclusions than I do. They're not idiots for suggesting best practices... it's just a nuisance.
That's what I mean about the rejection being too strong. It should be considered that best practices are often useful and helpful. We don't have to re-develop our intuitions from first principles on every project. It would be tedious to do so. But a healthy dose of skepticism should be used... especially when it comes to Postel's Law which has some decent research to suggest avoiding it.
There was recently a HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907412
Also it shouldn't be taken for granted that best practice is always "best/good" - there definitely are idiots recommending best practices.
SWEBOK seems the opposite of that. A body of knowledge is not at all the same thing as a best practice. The only unapologetic best practice in SWEBOK is that professionals should be familiar with every topic in SWEBOK. Definitely not that you _should_ do everything in the book.
The book is quite sophisticated in this. It explicitly separate the technical knowledge from the judgments of which, when, and where to apply it. Most occurrences of "best practices" in the text are quoted, and are references to other works and describe the need to choose between different best-practice libraries depending on context. Others are part of a meta-conversation about the role of standards in engineering. Very little of SWEBOK is promoted as a "best practice" in itself.
Here's a quote from SWEBOK v4, 12-5
> Foremost, software engineers should know the key software engineering standards that apply to their specific industry. As Iberle discussed [19], the practices software engineers use vary greatly depending on the industry, business model and organizational culture where they work.
In my view best practices emerge from a body of knowledge (or sometimes from the practice and wisdom of others that haven't been documented/accepted/etc yet) and are "shortcuts."
I'm not defending Postel's Law; I agree that, after years of practice and research, it leads to security issues and surprises.
However, the point is that these kinds of principles don't arise out of people's heads and become accepted wisdom for nothing; they're usually built off of an implied (or explicit) body of knowledge.
Does that make sense?
But SWEBOK is very clear that "best practices" are context specific - they are radically different forces and solutions in video games as compared to chemical engineering control systems. There's no such thing as a "best practice" absent a context. The footnotes in SWEBOK point off in a million directions saying "go look over there for best practices for YOUR context".
And to be fair, the best practices for designing a bridge or a skyscraper are not the same ones for designing a doghouse.
Recently I was told that Hungarian notation was "best practice" and I must use it.
The author might go on to make other points that are worth discussing, but lays out his supporting arguments clearly in the opening paragraph. Best practices do not necessarily do harm because they offer bad advice, they do harm because they are advocated for by zealots and the inexperienced.
My first reaction is how unfortunate it is that this particular developer has found himself in the presence of bad engineers and the inexperienced.
But then, the argument is automatically self-defeating. Why is the rest of the article even worth reading, if he states upfront what his arguments are and those arguments are very easy to refute?
It is deeply irrational to judge the merits of an idea based solely on who is advocating for that idea.
My advice to the author is to reflect on the types of positions that he accepts, the ones that have him so put off by the people that he works with that he is openly writing about abandoning what he admits could be sound engineering practice, solely based on who that advice is coming from and how it is being delivered.
Developing software is complicated. It is constant problem solving. When solutions to problems come about, and we abstract those solutions, it is quite easy for individuals to misapply the abstraction to an inappropriate concrete. To drop context and try to retrofit a lousy solution because that solution was appropriate to a slightly different problem. But at the end of the day, these abstractions exist to try and simplify the process. Any time you see a "best practice" or design pattern acting as a complicating force, it is not doing its job. At that point you can either be objective and exercise some professional curiosity in order to try and understand why the solution adopted is inappropriate ... or you can take the lazy way out and just assume that "best practices" are the opinions of zealots and the inexperienced who blindly follow because they don't know any better.
It's not very hard to weigh a suggestion. speculate about its costs, benefits and risks.
I think the point is that blindly suggesting "best practices" often is bad advice.
It's a common form of bikeshedding—it allows someone to give their casual two cents without doing the hard work of thinking through the tradeoffs.
I think that’s what this article is basically saying. And I agree.
In every case where you want to say “best practice” there is a better alternative, which is to say “practice.” The concept of best is never needed or warranted, because practices are not subject to rigorous testing and review.
I have been an independent consultant and trainer since 1999 and not once have I taught or recommended a best practice.
I do have many opinions. I call them: opinions. I think my opinions are the best, but I can’t think of any reason that anyone else beyond my wife and dog should think so.
> “Don’t Repeat Yourself” (DRY) is basically good advice, but sometimes just copy/pasting things is just the more pragmatic thing to do, and not really a big deal.
Duplicating code on purpose is not about being pragmatic, it's about recognizing when DRY would violate the single responsibility principle.
The ability to weigh tradeoffs in context is what makes some engineers better than others.
It sounds to me like they did understand the tradeoffs. But that they were being brow-beaten to apply "best practices" that were inapplicable because of the tradeoffs.