Against Best Practices

Follow best practices unless you can give a reason not to. "Best practice" is a shorthand for a lot of accumulated knowledge that you don't want to go over again every time. Also following BP makes the code more consistent and thus easier to understand. But when an argument arises, go back to the underpinnings of the best practice and work from there.

Often what is one developers "best practice" is another's "anti-pattern" because a lot of this is just arbitrary.