Against Best Practices

Software around us is quite terrible, so it’s kind of obvious that one shouldn’t follow “best practices” that led to this state of things.

That implies they were created with best practices in the first place.

If not, then what was created with best practices in the first place?

If we can agree that most large, financially successful software projects are of questionable quality, then either

- they used best practices and yet they still suck, OR

- they did not use best practices, but are widely successful anyway.

So no matter how you look at it, software best practices just haven't panned out.

Maybe if people didn't follow best practices their software would be terrible-er? Guardrails for hard things doesn't imply no guardrails would make it easier.

The name “best practices” kind of implies that they actually are practiced somewhere. So it’s different from theoretical abstract ideas “how we should write software”, which maybe nobody follows.

"All hardware sucks, all software sucks."