Why Best Practices Suck

Transcript

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   Why Best Practices Suck

   

   Robin Moffatt
   Principal Consultant, Rittman Mead
   

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   The Additional Problem
   

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   When taken from a 

   position of knowledge and
   understanding 

   best practices can be useful to 

   codify existing knowledge
   Good Best Practices?
   

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   Bad Best Practices!
   •Silver Bullets
   •“Laundry Lists” of settings to change
   •Random Jiggling
   •Absolutes without context
   […] “I will jiggle things randomly
   until they unbreak” is not acceptable.
   — Linus Torvalds, April 2011
   

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   Guesswork Is Risky
   If you don’t know why what you did
   worked, then you don’t know that
   you’ve not caused ‘collateral damage’
   

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   How Long?
   If you’re just guessing, you can’t
   honestly estimate the remaining
   time to solve the problem
   

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   Déjà vu?
   If you don’t know
   what the problem
   was, you’re
   doomed to repeat
   the same mistake
   again in the future
   

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    If It Looks Like a Duck …
    Even obvious problems
    aren’t always obvious
    

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    Knob Twiddler?
    Do You Want to be
    the Monkey or the
    Organ Grinder?
    

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    The only “best practice” you should be
    using all the time is “Use Your Brain”.
    — Steven Robbins / Tom Kyte
    

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    #EOF
    ✴ email: robin.moffatt@rittmanmead.com
    ✴ web: http://ritt.md/rmoff
    ✴ twitter: @rmoff
    ✴ IRC: rmoff / #obihackers / freenode
    

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