BUILDING STUFF
- OOP. Your brain is hard-wired to think in terms of entities, objects, and data structures. You know that sometimes software scales up quickly, so supporting it effectively requires intelligent design practices.
- Fail intelligently. You’re good at what you do, but you’re ready to fail at any moment so you build with redundancy and fault-tolerance.
- Pick the right tool. Technology is a means, not an end. You know exactly where the bleeding edge is and see the future of tech, but live in the realm of reality and practicality.
SECURING STUFF
- Hack this site. Seriously. You’re the type of person who thinks hackthissite.org is one of the coolest places on the internet, so every line of code you write has an eye to keeping things safe.
- PII isn’t a misspelling of pie or roman numerals of P2. You protect your users’ information more tightly than you protect your puppy (puppy not required).
Access control. Alice and Bob are your best friends, but you know that Alice and Bob are inherently untrustworthy. You write your code to make sure Alice and Bob can’t conspire against you or your users.
SCALING STUFF
- Speed. A teen expects a response to a text message in under 14 minutes. We’re shooting for no more than 5. That means the platform needs to run fast, and support agents need to be able to use it efficiently and effectively.
- Testing. Testing isn’t just clicking buttons. Testing means optimizing user experience and listening to your users rather than your gut. And of course, running automated tests too. You would never deploy untested code into production, right?!
- Cloud. You can think scale. The cloud isn’t a solution, it’s an assumption.