All those good practices we don't need

Books, blogs, foras, conferences - everywhere we can read and learn how important it is to follow software development practices, rules and laws. How important it is to continuously refactor the code, write tests and take care of the code quality and its cleanliness. And yet, there’re many projects with code that would be hard to describe as readable, descriptive or easy to maintain. There’re many projects without tests or with tests that purpose is only to satisfy some coverage statistics. There’re many projects where developers does not follow any good principles. Projects that are still changed and developed. Projects we still work on. There are many developers who are great experts, with whom other wants to work with. Great experts who does not follow and loudly criticise all those so called good practices.

If that’s true, maybe it would be worth to ask ourselves do we really need all of them? Maybe we should focus on writing a code instead of thinking how to make it “clean” and satisfy all those unclear and unnamed quality criterias?

During the talk I will share with you situations when applying good principles brings more harm than gains. I will do my best to convince you to stop following them always and ever. I will try to make you doubt and think if it is really worth to follow them.