03/Principles
The standards we hold ourselves to.
A new company cannot point to a history. It can state the standards it works to and be judged against them. These are ours.
3.1/Engineering principles
01
Reliability
Reliability is a requirement, not a later optimisation.
A system is only useful if it behaves the same way tomorrow as it does today. We treat availability, failure behaviour, and recovery time as design constraints that are decided at the beginning, because they are extremely expensive to add at the end.
02
Engineering
Decisions are made from measurements, not from impressions.
We prefer evidence to intuition: measure the current behaviour, state what the change is expected to do, then verify it. When we do not know something, we say so and go and find out rather than shipping a guess.
03
Quality
Software has to remain safe to change.
Testing, consistency, and maintainability are what allow a small team to keep working on a system for years. Code is read far more often than it is written, so we optimise for the reader and accept that this is slower in the short term.
04
Privacy
Data that is never collected cannot be exposed.
We treat privacy as an engineering constraint rather than a policy document. That means collecting the minimum information a system genuinely needs, limiting who and what can reach it, and keeping it only as long as there is a reason to.
05
Simplicity
A system nobody understands cannot be operated.
Every component, dependency, and abstraction has a permanent cost in attention. We prefer the smaller solution that one person can hold in their head, and we remove things that no longer earn their place.
3.2/Application
These principles are written down so that they can be checked. They describe how decisions are made inside the company, not how we would like to be perceived from outside it.