When To Say No To Best Practices

As I’m rocking my third week as a senior software engineer in a corporate environment, I think back to the wildly different things I’ve done in the past few years.

I remember the different roles I had, the projects I worked on, the ducktape solutions to get a SaaS to market ASAP, sales calls, tech interviews, hiring, and letting people go.

I’m a jack of all trades with Jack’s benefits and shortcomings.

But enough of the jokes! I’m now a serious senior software engineer in a big tech company and should live up to the role.

Best practices, eloquent design, clean code. 👼

As such a wise engineer, I have thought I’d show just how good an engineer I am.

Let me give you a visual of what happened when I reviewed a PR.

Let me ask you this.

How much are your best practices worth?

Are they worth 4 seconds per unit test?

Mine certainly aren’t.

So here’s what happened:

I raised a concern about the way how we tested some UI components. Tests should resemble the way how the user interacts with the elements.

Everyone agreed that this was the best practice, and they followed that standard with a few exceptions. But I just later realized why.

These tests were incredibly slow because of how the “best practice” way interacted with other parts of the app.

They were CI timeout slow.

I’ve spent so much time trying to make my best practices work that I can’t tell anyone, so I’m telling you. And these best practices I was chasing aren’t some mumbo-jumbo I read in a highly theoretical book. I used these practices in multiple projects and thousands of tests, and they always worked.

But here, they didn’t.

Sometimes, the best practices you can apply are as good as the worst practices someone else used.

So hereby, I grant you permission to act as you see fit. 📝

I’m not saying do anything you want.

Writing maintainable software that lasts is still one of our core values, but please, please don’t chase dogmas.

Don’t be a code-cleaning fanatic.

Balance it with practicality.

Verify.

Make sure making an exception is appropriate and hit LGTM.

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