Best Practices

• Why best practices are important?
  • What do we all want at the end of the day?
    • Faster development
    • Fewer bugs
    • More opportunities for learning
  • Instead of best practices, think of them as chosen conventions - instead.
• What makes a convention "good"?
  • There are two main factors that contribute to whether a convention is good or not:
    • They enable developers to write great code with a low barrier of entry
    • They are easy to refactor and/or abandon
• How to implement conventions
  • There are three main stages to implementing chosen conventions:
    • Selection
      • Define the problem
      • Things are rarely objective and absolute
      • Avoid bike-shedding
      • Time-constrained voting
      • Disagree and commit
      • 3 month discussion freezes
    • Implementation
      • Automate everything
        • Linters (i.e., eslint, stylelint, markdownlint)
        • Formatters (i.e., prettier)
        • Image Optimization (i.e., image-min)
        • Generators (i.e., hygen/plop)
        • Code Snippets (i..e, VS Code)
    • Maintenance
      • Build emotional safety and awareness
        • Don't blame individuals
        • Find systematic solutions
        • If you have power, protect your devs
      • The Jidoka principle
        • Discover an abnormality
        • Stop the process
        • Fix the immediate process
        • Investigate and solve the root cause
        • The Andon Cord