Often I see people in articles, comments, and chat espousing "the right way" to code. Other times I get asked questions starting with "I'm implementing X just like your [article|book|comment|chat]". Both of these situations give me pause, because I think there is an important point often not stated: None of us are right, myself included.

This is because there's no one way to accomplish a goal in coding. I find this fortunate, as novice programmers would be screwed by the mental leaps needed to understand a senior programmer's methodologies. It would also halt progress of discovering new and useful patterns.

Instead, everyone is somewhere in a spectrum between a "programming novice", and being an "experienced programmer". The difference between novice and experience is learning techniques in code maintenance.

We're all on our way to learning new techniques and ideas. What we write today, we'll throw out tomorrow. This article, and its expansion of ideas I touched on in my Laravel book, is one personal reflection of that.

So what's my point?

Instead of copying everything to the letter, take what you read and modify it to your needs. Try new and stupid things. Also, the depth of knowledge you'll find in a good book is better than anything you'll find in a blog article.