Targeted strategies over dogmatic best practices

That's all well and good, but I've certainly worked at companies where "that's not a best practice" is one of those thought stoppers. You can't argue with it.

The author of the article says that best practices aren't actionable, that they're vague guiding principles. He's never worked at a place where you had to trigger up your C++ to have as much inheritance as possible, inheriting from some mystical base class that used the key word "virtual" a lot, and then had to write constructors, copy constructors, etc etc, because all of those things were "best practices".