I stumbled upon an awesome new YouTube channel for programmers - Worst Practices. Specifically, Worst Practices in Software Development. The tagline is "we've all heard enough about everyone's best practices in software development, we're here to talk about … worst practices."

I've written about "best practices" for teaching before - I don't believe in them - I believe in practices that are good under certain circumstances. Maybe in the majority of circumstances but there's no silver bullet.

In software development, it's similar. Even though we call certain things best practices, there's no such thing. There's the practice but that has to be tempered with the circumstances - people, project, environment, deadlines and more. Sounds similar to the situation with teaching.

Now, specifically for the video series, the presented "worst practices" are things that we all do or have done as software developers - debugging with print statements, not reading documentation, using an under-powered editor or not using your editor/ide "correctly" etc. Just like in teaching, a frowned upon practice can be the right one under the right circumstances. In one video, Leah Culver talks about print statement debugging. It's frequently the most sensible and efficient way to go rather than using a debugging tool. Other times, the tool is betetr. As Brian Kernighan said:

The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

Julia Evans doesn't "read the documentation" but I'm guessing her approach of using a code sample and building from there has worked for her over the years.

Thea Flowers doesn't use package managers. Maybe things are better now, but I've been burned with paths and versioning enough times over the years to certainly get that one.

Anyway, the series is short right now. Eight videos of about five minutes each and they're great. Lots of fun and good material to think about.

As a programmer, I 100% endorse the series. As a teacher, I do as well.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/@WorstPractices