Here is a brief summary:
Its hard to concisely convey all the factors that go into every engineering decision that we make, but here as a few core tenets that we try to keep in mind.
There are no unknowns
Engineering is a precise science. If you understand the workings of your software well enough, no bug should be a mystery for too long. Put the right guardrails in place, be systematic in your approach, and don’t give up.
Not Shipping is Costly
Yes, we understand that a 6-node 2 rack Cassandra cluster with a well thought out schema and distributed redis caching may be more efficient than dumping everything in Mongo. But it also takes longer to ship and is harder to maintain. Not for nothing, but we understand the opportunity cost of not having a feature in the hands of users.
Build What Others Cant, Buy the Rest
We happily and gratefully gobble up every bit of reliable code that others might have written that allows us to focus on building the core thing that nobody else has built. There is no shame in standing on the shoulders of giants in order to reach greater heights.
Be the yes guy
It happens often that we’re tasked with building something challenging or seemingly impossible. In these situations we try to be less “this can’t be done” and more “how can we get this done”.
Means to an End
Its easy to drift into a state of flow when programming and just build for the sake of building. We try to keep our focus on what our code will enable someone to do that they coudn’t before. Make no mistake, we love writing clean code, and we enjoy our work. But we enjoy the end result more 😇.