Against Best Practices

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."