3 ms·

Best practices are not one-size-fits-all

• themodelplumber 6y ago
  Good points! I remember when I picked up an enterprise CMS project from another web developer, long ago. Gradually it dawned on me that while the CMS supported and even mandated lots of enterprise-level best practices, and that "felt good" in a CV/resume-sort-of-way, it was also probably about one big update away from breaking in a few key places that would take an entire team of developers to fix. One of our most powerful third-party components used with this system had already been sold to a third party, who seem to have purchased it solely for the mailing list, and shortly thereafter started sending us spam emails for telecommunications hardware. The more I talked to developers and especially evangelists of this software, the more they pointed me to the "holy scripture" best practices. Eventually I decided to move to something comparatively lightweight and flexible, and we've been with that for almost 10 years now without so much as a hint of a system-breaking update. I can't speak a yes/no to every best practice, but I can say we have thought about most of them and developed a nuanced position that is at least somewhere in between.