This is the second entry in the Best Practices Gone Bad series of posts. One principle that a lot of developers have been holding to lately is DRY. In The Pragmatic Programmer, Hunt and Thomas state the DRY principle as: Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system. This… Read More »
As a first post in the Best Practices Gone Bad series, I figured I would take an simple example from a previous job. An Example In that position, there were two best practices that intersected to generate unreadable code. The first practice was expressive names. All names of variables, classes, and methods were required to… Read More »
Most professional fields develop a set of best practices that help people in the field produce consistent solutions to similar problems. Any given problem has an infinite number of potential solutions, some of those will actually work. Fewer still will work well. Best practices tend to prune some of the bad solutions by pointing out… Read More »