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best-practices

Probably a controversial opinion, but best-practices, kind of like discussion, subjective, poll, etc. are tags that more often than not describe the type of question and not the content. Most best-practices questions are either 1) mistagged, or 2) lists of things to do (i.e. subjective community-wiki questions).

For more discussion: Are questions about best practices bad?

If that's really what you're after - a practice widely-recognized as "best" that you can adopt as your own, then go for it. All too often though, i see people asking for a "best practice" when what they really want to know is:

"Given my situation, what are the available solutions to my specific problem, and which one should I choose?"

Note the key difference: if you aren't free to make changes, potentially major, to what you're doing and how you're doing it, then "industry best" is irrelevant - you just need something you can use now. Perhaps it'll happen to be a Best Practice; perhaps it'll merely be the best of a bad set of hacks necessitated by the particular corner you've been painted into. But regardless, the focus has to be on you.

Tetrad Mod
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