Culture, Faux Pas, Development Process And Engineering Criteria In A Successful Technology Company

Find your passion and build on it
You finish your bachelor’s and you think you know everything, your master’s and you realize you know nothing, your doctorate and you realize no one else knows anything
Be humble !
Research matters - you must read papers
Implementation matters - you must read open source code
Ask hard questions first (will this work ?) - figure out details and timeframes later
Anything can be prototyped in a day (doesn’t have to work)
No sandbagging !
Ask for forgiveness, not permission
You’ve built it - you own it
Think outside the servlet
It is OK to fail, as long as you care
With great power comes great responsibility
If you use an external “tool” - make sure you can write patches for it
Learn and build something new every week
Know something about everything and everything about something
Find your industry peers (Google, Twitter…) and make sure you’re at least as good
Think “how would I build this” first / “what tools are out there” second
Follow at least one open source mailing list
Learn how to setup your own servers
Never be “blocked”, on anyone or anything
Great teams need no management or cargo cult processes
No matter what you do, you must code

Using Cron
Promoting Open Source projects based on it’s website’s first page (”… it’s document-oriented-highly-scalable-yaddda”)
Paying for tools
Hiring consultants for Platform work
Not monitoring production infrastructure
Not optimizing for performance and cost
Not understanding how things work
Not caring about the product
Not trying hard enough
Pointing fingers

Use Github for source control, wiki & tickets
Use google apps for collaboration
Use Trello for project management
If in need of productivity tools - use Github and Trello API and hack something together
Peer review over formal review - at least two pairs of eyes on each piece of production code
Joint ownership - find an engineer that believes what you’re building is important
Building the right thing comes first - code quality second
Release daily, release weekly
Write the right amount of documentation
Always be testing / cover important questions first (integration, performance, do results make sense ?)
QA is for 1M+ projects only