Hi, I’m Ariana.
I’ve noticed something strange in tech.
We love the phrase “best practices.”
It makes everything feel safe.
If everyone is doing it, it must be correct.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
A lot of “best practices” are just old solutions to old problems.
And when we copy them without thinking, we also copy the old mistakes.
Best practices are not universal
Every best practice was created for a specific situation.
A startup that needed to scale fast
A big company managing thousands of engineers
A product optimized for growth
That solution worked there.
But your team might be different.
Your users might be different.
Your goals might be different.
When we copy patterns without checking the context, we inherit problems that were never ours.
They make decisions easier — maybe too easy
Best practices reduce thinking.
You don’t have to argue.
You don’t have to explore alternatives.
You just say: “It’s the industry standard.”
That feels efficient.
But software decisions are not supposed to be automatic.
When we stop asking “why are we doing this?”, we stop designing. We start imitating.
“Best” according to what?
Many best practices are optimized for:
Growth
Engagement
Speed
Scale
But what if your goal is stability?
Or clarity?
Or user trust?
A pattern that increases engagement might reduce user control.
A pattern that improves speed might increase long-term complexity.
The word “best” hides trade-offs.
And every technical decision has trade-offs.
Repetition turns mistakes into standards
When enough companies adopt the same approach, it stops being questioned.
It becomes normal.
And once something is normal, it’s hard to challenge — even if it creates problems.
Over time, yesterday’s shortcuts become today’s architecture.
That’s how old mistakes survive.
They don’t look like mistakes anymore.
They look like standards.
What I try to do instead
I’m not against learning from others.
But I try to ask a few simple questions:
What problem was this solving originally?
Do we actually have that problem?
What are we giving up by choosing this?
Is this helping our users — or just helping us move faster?
Sometimes the answer is still yes.
But now it’s a conscious choice.
Not habit.
The real risk
The biggest risk is not choosing the wrong tool.
The biggest risk is choosing something just because everyone else did.
Following best practices feels safe.
But safety in software comes from understanding your decisions — not copying them.
Otherwise, we’re not building something better.
We’re just repeating old mistakes with new terminology.
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