Episode 84: When Not to Follow Best Practices cover art

Episode 84: When Not to Follow Best Practices

Episode 84: When Not to Follow Best Practices

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 The episode opens with Mike sharing two stories that set up a theme: context beats dogma. First, a bike rack bolt snaps seven miles from home with his toddler on board; he “hacks” a fix using a strap to limp back safely—imperfect but right for the moment. Second, he yells to stop that same child from leaning over a railing—normally a “don’t,” but justified to prevent harm. Bridging to software, Mike argues that sometimes you should break best practices: a hard-coded, partner-specific access control once shipped as a pragmatic stopgap, worked for years, and only now is being replaced with a proper, general solution. From there, the group explores when and why “best” practices stop being best. Dave frames it as “there’s always a best move”—for this context. Will and Kyle note performance work routinely trades readability and safety for speed; measurement is essential, or all you’ve done is make code harder to read. They contrast language and ecosystem philosophies (Python’s “one right way,” Ruby’s malleability, Java’s explicit structure), agree that humans are the expensive resource (optimize for mental load and boring, readable code), and acknowledge domains (firmware, game engines) where constraints force “ugly” but necessary code. The team also debates two coexisting feature-control systems—slow but self-contained env-based flags vs. instant, granular runtime flags—concluding both are needed because different roles value different trade-offs. They close on practical guardrails: prototype fast, even “sloppy,” to learn and validate; refactor after you’re green. Use YAGNI—don’t solve tomorrow’s problems today—and be kind to “future you.” Keep a backlog of intentional hacks, prioritize cleanup time, and recognize that some code paths matter far more than others (optimize the hot ones; duplicate templates when sharing adds needless complexity). Break rules deliberately in sandboxes to learn (e.g., Juice Shop, OWASP exercises), but in production favor simplicity: make it easy and explicit unless you’re forced not to—then measure, mitigate, and circle back to clean it up. Transcript: MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I will be hosting again today. With me, I've got Jordan, Will Archer. We've got Dave. DAVE: Howdy, howdy. MIKE: And Justin, and Kyle. And, as usual, I'm going to tell a story [chuckles]. Actually, I've got a handful of them here. I'm not sure if I can share all of them, but I think I want to introduce the story by first telling a story about cycling. The great Sandi Metz shares a lot of good stuff. She talks about cycling all the time. I can do lots of cycling stuff, right? So, I'm going to tell a cycling story. So, I was riding with my kids, and I had my youngest in a bike seat sitting on a rack that was over my back tire. And he was getting a little big probably for it [chuckles], but it worked fine. I could do it. What I didn't know is that maybe getting that top-heavy on the rack I had was putting a lot of stress on the bolts that were holding it up. And I was doing a loop, and it was, like, seven miles from home, luckily, not that far, but seven miles from home. And the bolt sheared off that's holding the rack up [chuckles]. Not a great thing, you know [chuckles]? DAVE: With him in the seat? MIKE: With him in the seat. That’s right. DAVE: Because of the weight on the bolts. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. MIKE: Weight on the bolts. And so, the rack drops on the tire, suddenly stopped. I’m going up a hill when this happened, you know, rocking back and forth because I'm going up the hill, of course, putting the stress on the bolts. I suddenly stop. You're not moving anymore, right? Now what [chuckles]? Seven miles from home. I can't really push the bike because now the rack's sitting in it. I can't take him off the bike and make him walk seven miles. He's, like, three years old [laughs], right? That's not going to happen. I also had a tether to pull the other two kids. So, it was a bad situation. What do I do now? No one was at home to come pick us up. I could have called, like, an Uber or something, but what do you do? "Uber driver, can you come put three bicycles and a car seat [chuckles]?" There was no good way out of the situation. DAVE: You got two kids on a tether. Dog sled. MIKE: Dog sled [laughs]? Not going there [laughs]. DAVE: Fair. MIKE: After some careful analysis, I got an idea, and I had a strap that I use for strapping stuff to the frame, like a water bottle. And I connected the strap to my bike seat, to the rails on the bike seat, to hold it up, and wrapped it around one side of the rack and pulled it really tight. So, it was just hanging from the strap by my seat. I found that if I sat down on my seat…and I was standing up to peddle, right? I went as gently as I could. It didn't hit my spokes very often [laughs]. I got back on, and I rode seven miles home that ...
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