# My Work Philosophy

# Values

Tough & Competent

Tough means we are accountable to our customers. We take responsibility for our software and our service, and always internalize any issue that arises.

Competent means we are always learning, always improving. We will not let small victories put us on our heels, but instead will use those victories as a launch pad to tackle harder problems.

Service before Self

We are here to serve our customers. Software is our job, not our customer's. We will treat every interaction with the same selfless servant leadership that we would want to be treated with.

Hire adults and treat people like adults...that is just table stakes. If it's not a good fit, then the answer isn't more process and procedure, the answer is it isn't a good fit.

Convention over Configuration

Avoid configuration wherever possible. You don't want to build ten great things that get strung together with complicated glue - you want to build an iPhone where it all just works. Every configuration option adds complexity, which makes things harder to use, develop, support, and less friendly.

Make features that are configurable is lazy. Make sensible defaults where you must have a configuration. Great UX is not giving everything that someone wants to them - it's giving them what they need.

If you had asked people what they wanted for transportation in 1900, they would have said a faster horse. Henry Ford avoided configuration whenever possible.

Minimum Viable Change (MVC)

Always look to make the quickest change possible to improve the user's outcome. If you validate that the change adds more value than what is there now, then do it. No need to wait for something more robust.

Make small merge requests, review them quickly, and merge them early and often. Follow the GitLab Flow. Test hypotheses and celebrate when your assumptions were wrong. Have a bias for action, be ambitious, fail fast, don't wait for consensus. Without that, there is no way to innovate.

# Guiding Quotes

Take care of the people, the products, and the profits - in that order

Ben Horowitz

...no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.

Margaret Hamilton

Make something people want

Paul Graham

Listen to your customers, not your competitors

Joel Spolsky

You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people.

Grace Hopper

If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.

Eric Gill

A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Steve Jobs

Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.

Steve Jobs

Useless is not worthless.

Charlie Gerard