I generally like to think of myself as a patterns and practices guy. I like the structure and guidelines that they give me, my teams, and my projects. In general I find that developing against best practices and current patterns helps my projects to live longer and be more easily developed against and maintained.
However, I have been spending a lot of my (3 hours a day) drive time listening to various pod casts. One that I especially like to listen to is StackOverflow's podcast. Of all my podcast subscriptions this one seems to be so far in the left field that I just can't help but listen. I also listened to the podcast on Hanselminutes where Scott interviewed the StackOverflow team about how this (SO) site was built. The interview was so intriguing that it spawned an additional "behind the scenes" interview where Scott really got into their business.
I also heard mention on a DotNetRocks podcast regarding an easter egg method that was built into SubSonic called an Atwood method (something like that) where by a user can just make a direct SQL call through the ORM from the presentation layer bypassing all other layers! I couldn't imagine every doing this (in my early development days perhaps that was ok).
I do my best to follow along with the alt.net community but (question:) At what time does productivity and simplicity supersede doing things the (SO-called) right way? StackOverflow is a fully functioning site that is in the wild and working - patterns and practices be damned!