How to apply best practices
What works at Google should work in your garage, probably
We grow up imitating those that are bigger than us. We want to be a big boy, so we walked and talked like our parents. If we are raised by people who sing, we probably sing. If we are raised by wolves, we probably bark and bite.
You might think that we outgrow biting, but it is still in us and can be manipulated.
This is called the “aspirational model” and is the foundation of a lot of advertising. Remember where it says in the bible: I wish I was a little bit taller, a baller, I wish I had a girl who looked good I would call her1
We aspire to be better: to direct one's hopes or ambitions towards achieving something. Advertisers tap into this when they show us commercials of people who look like professional athletes taking weight loss medicine or people who look like bicycles riding Pelotons, and the implicit message is “if you buy this your life can be like mine is”. Every car commercial says: if you drive this car, then you will park it in an impressive house full of all your dreams come true with fridges with eggnog in June and pantries stocked with all the types of Skittles, and video game consoles with all the versions of Megaman2 which you can play when you get tired of playing basketball in a full indoor gym with a stereo system playing Outkast 24/7.
No car commercial shows regular people driving them, with creaky knees and large heads straining to get out after parking at an Applebee’s on all-you-can-eat-ribs-night.
Something this low-level is hard to not carry around with you, so it is effective in getting you to jump at work as well. But at work you might look up to different people. You might want to do what some tech influencer does, or someone that just gave a talk at that tech conference that work sent you to last year. And your company might be made up of people who wished that they worked at Google. If they worked at Google, then they could tell their mom and dad that they work at Google, and then they could tell their friends that their offspring works at Google and somehow things would be OK with you, on the inside.
Best Practices
So anyway, this is what best practices are, at their worst. They are a series of commercials by people to try to get you to do the Right Thing, in a way in which they profit. At best, they are a series of helpful tips from craftsmen and craftswomen3 that help you learn your chosen profession.
Speaking of craft, sometimes craftspeople like to use their own tools, and they like to pull the right tool for the job out. This doesn’t apply to software. For example, you might have heard about Kubernetes, which is a very strong name for a system that coordinates large groups of machines to do what you want them to do. Think of it as a conductor of an army of paper shredders.
You might think - man you would need to be a really big company to need a way to manage a lot of machines that shred paper. This is wrong. Its a best practice. I mean you probably don’t need a murdered-out gun metal black BMW M3 to drive to your ex-girlfriends’s house, but don’t you sort of want to.
Kubernetes is actually right for everyone, because it is the right way to do things, from the beginning. If you deploy it at your startup, you will be cool, and you can tell your mom and dad (before the startup goes out of business) that you might not be working at Google, but you are doing what they do by deploying 65,000 clusters at scale using AI. Sure, the clusters are basically drones that drop money into paper shredders, but it is a best practice.
This might not be the translation you have, does yours say Skee-Lo on the front
Substitute what you care about here, these are made up examples don’t pay attention to them and instead look at my most visited bookmark