Ask HN: What do you search for when you want Best Practices? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you search for when you want Best Practices?

2 pointsohjeez6 comments

Look, I dislike the term "best practices" as much as you do. For starters, it sounds like a marketing phrase, even when it's not. And it suggests that there's only one "best" way to do something.

What we tend to mean is, "Tell me where the bodies are buried" or "What are the accepted ways to solve this problem" or "I want to know about the common errors so I can avoid them." The problem is... when you write an article that answers those questions, it has lousy SEO or at least is long-winded.

As a result, we authors and editors slap on a title of "FooBar Best Practices" anyway.

Unless there's another phrase you use, instead? If you want to read an article that summarizes "Things that serious techies learned the hard way," what would you type into a search engine?

The hard way for me means to do a serious research which means digging every whitepapers in the field. That may cause an unexpected result if done properly. For example, learning hard way to touchtype a QWERTY keyboard may result in discovering Dvorak layout.

I'm thinking less about "the deep dive into..." than "the things everyone using FooBar should know."

Try a word "koan", like javascript koans.

Github code search is my go to tool when I wonder if there is a more elegant solution to something I'm trying to do. For example, just today I was looking at chessboard implementations with Angular. A couple of days ago I was looking for epoll() based event loops.

Really handy, but it takes a good 10-20 minutes of browsing to get an idea. There are a lot of false positives and forks.

On the other hand, there is nothing better at actually seeing code written in a real project and judging for yourself how readable it is.

i spend a few minutes googling, going through a few SO answers, usually I can find the simplest most elegant solution that way in the fewest lines of code.

What are the phrases you're apt to try?

Do you ever give up and type in "best practices"?

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