Our Values

These things we believe:

1. Ethics. We will behave ethically in all situations.
2. Writing Things Down. We will work from home and be a distributed culture. And in a distributed culture, things have to be written down. Good writing is a skill for everyone not something reserved for writing.
3. Having the Hard Conversations Respectfully. In any culture there will be conflict. This can be done respectfully and without tripping anyone's bozo bit.
4. Do What We Say. We will keep our commitments and do the things we say. If we fail -- and that's expected -- then we will apologize and accept responsibility.
5. Openness and Transparency. Shining light on things makes the badness scurry away. That's the power of openness and transparency.
6. Revenue Disclosure. Every organization is, correctly, driven by its revenue sources -- and that's ok. Problems occur, however, when you fail to disclose your revenue sources.
7. Ethical Capitalism. Capitalism has been the single most transforming force in history and it has done more to lift people from poverty than anything else. Now, that said, capitalism without regulation and restraint is a violent beast. The capitalism I believe in was taught to me by my grandfather and it could be summarized as "do the right thing; don't chase every dollar; pay it forward; treat everyone with kindness".
8. Code of Conduct. We will treat each other with mutual respect. We have adoped the Github code of conduct it appends to every repo.
9. Work Should Be Secondary to Life. This is a business but business was not supposed to take over our lives. All staff are encouraged to take acknowledge this and, hopefully, take four day work weeks as often as they like.
10. World Class Technical Support. The high tech industry can - and should - offer world class support. Great support is possible when you have high gross margins -- which is all of the technology business -- although most people today don't remember great support, I do and we will offer it.
11. Poor Software Quality is a Literal Tax Upon the World. Poor quality software negatively affects the world. People creating software have a literal responsibility to not make the world worse by producing crappy, buggy software.
12. Version Control. We believe in change management and all documents, as much as possible, will be under version control.
13. Test Coverage. Even if it is nothing more than unit tests, test coverage improves software quality.
14. Pair Programming. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" - Linus' law. Pair programming brings more eyes on software earlier in the process -- the easiest to fix bug is the one that never gets in. The next easiest is the one that is found early in the process.
15. Open Source. Open Source is a profound technological change upon the world and we will participate in and give back as much as possible.