Sorry the logging thing and the configuration thing wasn't my point. What I was trying to say was all the best practices and standard way of doing things are no

Sorry the logging thing and the configuration thing wasn't my point. What I was trying to say was all the best practices and standard way of doing things are not set in stone and should be evaluated at every instance. Beginners write very inflexible code. When intermediate, they learn best practices and about making it flexible and keeping room for the future. But only after seeing enough projects in production, one will know which flexibilities make sense to the project at hand and which don't. For example, some changes even though very easy to implement are very difficult to push in production because of requirement of senior management approvals. Also, best practices depend on the actual environment that you work on. For e.g. In one of the projects, the DBA team had very cool people compared to the server admins who were a pain to deal with even when we had all the approvals. So we decided to keep the configurations in a table and not xml, as changes could be pushed easily!