How Important are Best Practices?

I was listening  to hanselminutes tonight and they were discussing code quality. Jeff Attwood of Stack Overflow and Coding Horror fame was discussing with Scott how they managed their production server. Let me just say that they did not follow what would be called “Best Practices”. Let me highlight a few of the items they discussed regarding StackOverflow.com:

• They run their Prod Web and Prod DB on the same server
• They run their Dev site on the same server as prod!
• They remote desktop into their publicly exposed box!!

Now as jaw-dropping as this is, you have to ask the big question…does it matter if their site solves their business need? Their site is highly successful and probably soon to be the next digg.com for techies.

I think that sometimes we get so worked about following best practices that it slows us down and distracts us from the business at hand. As Jeff described in the podcast, they wanted to get the site out fast and didn’t have a week to set up the ideal set of test cases.

They just coded it. Was it perfect from an architecture perspective?  Definitely not but it solved the problem and they got the site up and their users are none-the-wiser. It works and adds value to their lives (ie – solves the business problem).

At the end of the day, maybe that should be the only metric for success…

-Bryant