I was once in a role in which I was responsible for writing/maintaining a library of “best” practices for the product I worked with.<p>The “stop saying best” conversation is one that came up periodically, and for a time, I was very against using the word “best”. There is rarely a single right or best answer to any given problem, and I wanted people to understand this nuance. I didn’t want people to blindly follow the advice because it says “best” in the title.<p>But over time, I changed my views. “Best Practices” is a label for guidance that tries to keep people on the rails. When people want to know what to avoid or what they should definitely do, they search for “<Product> Best Practices”. It’s a category of information as much as anything else.<p>Calling these good practices, or implementation considerations, or some other label that tries to signal the nuance of the imperfect guidance or the impossibility of defining “best” just makes it hard to find the content.<p>People are smart and understand that “best” can’t be taken at face value. The engineer in me wanted to hammer this point home by making the content label reflect this. But this doesn’t really help much, and makes it less likely for people to find and read the content, which is a net negative. And the people who will blindly follow advice will keep doing so regardless of the title.