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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> some non/psuedo-technical person has pulled out "12 factor" like a universal yellow card has been enough for me, overall, to ignore it almost completely.

Ignoring it completely on principal is just as bad as the people who treat it like mandatory dogma.

I’ve also had over-eager junior engineers or wannabe architects use the 12-factor article as mandatory requirements for any launch. It takes a firm and unified explanation that these are good goals to strive for, but in the real world we need to make compromises for launch and choose which aspects to delay or defer.

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Ignoring it completely is a viable strategy. A lot of 12 factor sounds like common sense to people who regularly ship stuff. For example, if I fail to put the config in the environment, the risk that introduces will be immediately obvious in the PR and someone would be able to raise that concern, with real justification, not because it's declared in a 12 factor manifesto.

I think ignoring it completely is a viable strategy once you've already gone through the stages - when your mind is in the right place.

I have moved on a long way from the days that 12 factor was my bible, but those days completely redefined my way of developing software. I'm not exaggerating here - it completely shifted my approach.

I guess it's similar to Scrum in that way - it isn't a great end point, but if you're stuck in the old ways (i.e. the methods used before it was even a thing) then it's at least a good approach to sink your teeth into, try it out, shape your approach, and move on from there.

Basically, I'd rather see a replacement that improves on 12 factor than throwing out the book entirely.

> A lot of 12 factor sounds like common sense to people who regularly ship stuff.

In 2023, yes. A lot of the 12 factor methodologies became table stakes in the modern cloud era. Back when this was written "cloud" was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now, although we were certainly headed in that direction. A lot of the comments here are viewing this through a 2023 lens and forgetting it was written in 2011.

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