With any new venture, it’s important to clearly articulate the tenets of your philosophy and live it every day. This clarity of vision has the added benefit of aiding the onboarding process, and ensuring the team is aligned and shares common principles.

The vision for our development environment and culture was born way back when BrightTag was just a spark of an idea. As we’ve grown both the BrightTag team and the platform, I am happy to report that the original philosophy holds up.

For Internet posterity, here is the originally stated development philosophy that guides our efforts as we build a new integration platform for the digital marketing industry.

BrightTag Development Philosophy

We believe…

• Code quality is more important that code quantity
• Code must be peer-reviewed before it is committed
• That just about everything you need to create and deploy a web-based application is best served by a free, open source offering
• Open source projects are cool, and participating in open source development is even cooler
• In quick morning stand-ups, frequent communication, scoping work to short iterations, and releasing often
• You have to design for scale and geographical distribution from the very beginning
• Your development environment should mirror your production environment: at least two of everything
• That any network i/o call can, and will, fail

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About the Author

Prior to joining BrightTag as CTO, Eric Lunt was co-founder and CTO of FeedBurner, the leading RSS management company acquired by Google in 2007. After the acquisition, Eric remained at Google in a senior technology role. Prior to FeedBurner, Eric co-founded and served as CTO at Spyonit.com (acquired by 724 Solutions), served as lead technical architect at Digital Knowledge Assets (creators of the collaborative personal publishing software “sceneServer”), and helped to lead the application architecture team in Accenture’s next generation technology group known as “Project Eagle.” Eric graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering and a Certificate in Applied Computational Mathematics. In addition to his work at BrightTag, he is a senior technology advisor to Twitter and he also sits on the board of Gnip. Eric was recognized as one of Crain’s Tech 25 for his contributions to drive technology growth in Chicago and was named CTO of the Year at Built in Chicago's inaugural Moxie Awards.