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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

There is value in predictability, even if it stems from someone else's preferences.

Current home wiring requires you put wires in the wall at (I think) between 10 and 20 cm from the border, and a small number of cm inside the wall. This means you only have to check that zone, and can use detectors, to find the wires.

My home is from the 1950's. Some wires go diagonally from top left to bottom right at the other side of the wall. We had great fun finding out where they were hiding.

Even if the new wires waste a lot more wiring and PVC tube, I vastly prefer them when redecorating or drilling holes.

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100% that's true! I'm not saying developers having preferences and everybody abiding by them is a bad thing, more just that a lot of what constitutes "best practices" are often preferences and we should call them that.

Doesn't that kind of imply that everyone's opinions are equally valid? If 95% of your profession is on the same page with a certain practice then I'd argue it's really not reasonable to go against the grain without a very good reason.

I think "best practices" strikes a good balance between things that are personal preferences and things that are laws.

I'm not sure if there's anything 95% of developers are on the same page about.

From what I've seen, every company has a different idea of what _best practices_ are. Generally comes down to what some influential developer likes.

From what I've seen, every company has a different idea of what _best practices_ are.

And that's fine. "Best practices" don't necessarily need to be universal in scope. Read the Knowledge Management literature and you'll see plenty of discussion of the idea of scoping "best practices" to in terms of "site best practice", "company best practice", "industry best practice" and so on.

There's also a lot of discussion about using different language other than "best practice" exactly to acknowledge that "best practices" aren't always BEST practices, if you get what I mean. Calling them something like "recommended practices" or "proven practices" or similar lingo gives a way to denote things that are recommended at least locally, without having to claim that they are either universal in scope, or absolutely "best" in any sense.

Yeah it does. Software is basically a mental model and different people have different mental models of the world so we make up languages/practices/etc. that fit those models.

The point of the examples I gave (and a lot of browsing HackerNews) seems to suggest that 95% of the profession is not on board with our most basic practices around unit testing, version control, etc.

Maybe we just disagree about what constitutes best practices. I can't speak much about Java land, but I wouldn't describe rebasing in general as a best practice without further context. If you're working on a team that always rebases feature branches then your preference for not rebasing doesn't seem valid to me.

I agree, at least in my experience of android development, "Best Practice" often means: what I read on Medium, or what Google said.

It's for people who aren't confident enough to admit to simply having a preference, or knowledgeable enough to be able to explain it

1950's onwards they used ribbon cables close to surfaces for household wiring. It was best practice, just not today's.

As a freelancer jumping projects, I can't help but see parallels, in that you've really got to study code bases wrt the time of authorship to understand their particular idiosyncrasies.

In the 2010's, people believed in "REST" without considering the context in which these concepts were introduced (eg thin browser UIs, or generalizations thereof as a baseline). Customers, even highly capable devs, flaunt their REST best practices, yet see HATEOAS as optional and pretentious, failing to see the entire point of loose coupling and discovery, and engaging in zealotry about squeezing parameters into URLs instead. Or pretend to, to stop pointless discussions with mediocre, bureaucratic peers.

In many countries this is coded (mandated by standards), it is not a best practice.

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