Beware of excess of "best practices"
Tags: beginners, codenewbie, python, javascript
Published: 2022-01-20 12:58:14

Unlike other disciplines that are more rigid and regulated like Civil Engineering, Software Engineering doesn't have a set of rules to follow by law enforcement.

You won't go to jail if you don't do TDD (Test-Driven Design), or even write tests for your code.

Your system can work just fine if you don't follow any agile method.

You could deploy your next app in a bare-metal Linux machine instead of setting up Kubernetes on a cloud provider to auto-scale your pods, and no one will complain about performance and such.

We have all read Clean Code, Clean Architecture, and some other "bibles" of the software development world which tell us what are the "best practices".

We have all spent hours learning about Scrum or some similar methodology to manage a software project as opposed to old-fashioned cascade-like project management because that's what works "best".

We do tons of meetings, in Scrum alone we have: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

There are days when I wonder if I attend meetings for a living instead of developing software.

So, what is all this rant about?

It is about not following blindly the so-called "best practices".

I do X because Google does, I use Y because Facebook uses it.

This is a silly reason to do or use anything.

If you are not working with lots of people, in a huge project, with thousands of simultaneous users, following all the "best practices" can be a drawback instead of an advantage.

If you are working alone, in a small app with a handful of users, it is ok to commit directly into the main branch in your GitHub repo.

If your project is not database intensive, or only has to deal with very little data, you can use an embedded H2 database stored directly in your file system and it will work more than fine.

There are projects and teams where it makes sense to follow every single piece of advanced architecture and people management processes there are, but that's totally not the case for your startup of three people.

It is easy to be misled by reading about the latest tech and thinking "everybody is using this", when in fact they are not.

[FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as a Developer](https://renanmf.com/fomo-fear-of-missing-out-as-a-developer/) is real and you should be aware of this.

Choose the right tech for the right context in a rational way.

Choose the right project methodology for the right context in a rational way.

You don't have to ditch Scrum in its entirety, you can adapt it and do only 2 of the meetings described instead of all of them.

You can spawn a cheap Linux VM and deploy your app by hand instead of spending hours setting up CI/CD for something you can do manually in 2 minutes.

If your app screen is a simple feature with one text field and a button (like Google's home page), React/Angular/Vue is an overkill.

Learn all of those things, read the books, but use your best judgment to adapt the "best practices" to take advantage of what makes sense to your project and team, and not just because someone else said you should use it.

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