Mileage may vary

Do you follow ‘best practices’ in your work?

That may be unwise:

• Best practices enforce the map. The more people who follow it, the less valuable it becomes. We don’t have to follow.
• Best practices are often false-positives. A successful project may not be successful for the reasons the mapmaker thought.
• Best practices become fables. The mapmaker’s fame and fortune depends on people wrongly believing the map’s destination is typical.

There are times to follow the map and learn from those who went before us.

But we should always remember to draw on that map as we go.