Playbook

We don’t believe in keeping data for Sunday best.

Data is our prized asset – but it can’t deliver value if it’s locked away. In order to unleash its potential, we use linked data principles rather than isolating data in silos, we incorporate a formal model of provenance and we use a common domain model.

Meccano, not monoliths.

We orchestrate micro services, which means that rather than focusing on creating a monolith, we concentrate on building and perfecting replaceable parts to contribute to an excellent whole. In tech terms, we build RESTful, stateless services, which provide their own monitoring and are testable in isolation of other services.

No time to reinvent the wheel – we’re inventing the future.

When it comes to code, we prefer convention over configuration. Doing things in a standard way and using well-known design patterns ultimately makes for smarter engineering.

Two heads are better than one.

We embrace pair programming to enable us to achieve exceptional solutions faster. Our teams learn, share and create in real-time, pushing development along and accelerating progress.

In our world, code is guilty until proven innocent.

We build our tests first and then write code to pass them.

If knowledge is power, then think of us as a generator.

Knowledge distribution is central to our approach: we write self-describing code, encourage adoption through transparent, open documentation, provide guides and narrative for best use of services, write our documents from a support perspective and use information radiators to constantly share current status.

Isaac Newton claimed that what goes up must come down.We disagree.

We have 100% uptime, all the time, and we deploy without downtime. Everything fails, so we design to mitigate failure.

On top of our day jobs, we’re full-time security guards.

We look after a lot of data, so safeguarding its security is our priority. A single identity for each agent governs access, and access to data is governed by least privilege. The default is no access, so it’s opened only as and when. We exceed DPA compliance, log all access and secure all data in motion and sensitive data in rest and use.

Little and often makes much.

It’s more than something we got out of a fortune cookie – we believe in deploying little and often. We continuously integrate new code and deploy to production, which means we’re always pushing forward, never losing momentum.