Harmful Practices Considered Best
I recently came across Martin Tournoij’s Against Best Practices, and while I generally agree with his post’s thesis, I had my own thoughts on the matter, so here they are.
You don’t need to look hard within the developer discourse to come across a Considered Harmful manifesto,That is to say, an essay, paper, or blog post arguing some feature or tool shouldn’t be used within a specific context. the most famous of which is likely from legendary computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. Another common analogue of these in the zeitgeist are “best practices,” which are a similarly opinionated codex of such laws“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” , often critically lacking the former’s justification. While I feel like both of these have their place, it’s important they are contextualized, for without context their intention is easily distorted.
When starting out with any new technology, it’s easy to make what an expert would consider to be rookie mistakes. That’s a natural part of any learning process, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Best practices are meant to help steer you away from these beginner pitfalls. I like to think of them like training wheels on a bicycle: they’re critically helpful when starting off, but you eventually will need to learn to ride on your own. This means best practices should really not be taken as gospel, rather, they serve as a learning aid which you should eventually outgrow.
