Thoughts On A Work Environment

Small teams (two, three, four people) work well.

Moving about between projects and teams important to expand understanding of codebase (fosters reuse) and to avoid errors creeping in through systematic errors.

This also allows adjustments when people are off sick or on leave (or at conferences).

Trying things out is encouraged. If the job gets done, the general method is rarely criticised (but remember "code review with a chainsaw").

Helpful to have a CEO who can program in Python and is a technical person.

Being able to hand over day-to-day management is important. Code documentation (apart from inline) is not done too much. But operations manuals are important.

An ops department who have learnt Python and can read the code helps with debugging problems (particularly on a slow night at 0100).