Did you know that during 2024 the average Dutch person went 9 times to the doctor making it about 161.5 million doctor visits in one year? Which is still the half of the Poles, who went together 324.7 million times to the doctor. So, why are doctors so popular? What do they know or have, that we need to visit them so often?
Before a doctor, in case of this blog a general practitioner can start her/his own clinic and give the general medical treatment, there is quite an intensive period of study, practise and experience required. This ensures every patient/visitor that when the general practitioner gives medical advise or performs a treatment, its done with the knowledge and experience required. In short; following the best practise.
When we bring most of the general practitioner responsibilities into metaphor with the care of our Mendix application, we can see quite some similarities.
When looking at the list of the general practitioner responsibilities, we expect that all responsibilities are performed according to the required medical best practises and that there are no flaws in the execution. Now if we look at responsibilities of the Mendix developer, we might think; are we also constantly aware of the Mendix best practises in times of emergency care (hotfixes) or during the Preventive care (Application Life Cycle Management)?
While of course a general practitioner works with the lives of human beings and Mendix developers work on with a digital application, one might argue that its less important for a Mendix Developer to follow Best Practises. However, in mine opinion, Best Practises should not be a choice based on the relation to other situations or practises happening around us. So when it feels that Best Practises are slowing you down, you might think as well that going fast, without working on the Best Practises safety clips here and there, might fire back to you one day, without a doubt!
So wrapping this up; My advice would be, make sure that when you work on a Mendix project, to have the health of the application always under control. Work on its preventive care, so it does not end on the Intensive Care for immediate treatment. Also spend enough time for personal focus and share decisions making (with user/stakeholder), so that together you are keeping the Mendix application healthy and ready to perform at its best!