At Playful Programming, we want to establish a set of guidelines that we should strive to hold ourselves to in every avenue we pursue. Whether publicly or privately, we want to have these principles act as our guiding light.
You may notice that we set these principles as "This > That". This establishment of preference is because no guiding principle is ever correct 100% of the time and having the flexibility and ability to break from established patterns in certain scenarios is critical for the continued operation of our platform.
We strive to adapt the "It depends" mantra when faced with obstacles. We understand that the more understanding into a problem only exposes that which we still do not yet know.
It's this complexity that should lead us to ask "why" when faced with new avenues which we could explore.
Rather than ensuring an absolute success, we prefer to openly experiment and learn from our shortcomings. We should know the risks and benefits of our actions, but understand that we won't always have the complete picture in advance.
While this might seem at odds with the last value, we want to err on the side of action rather than inaction. We know that even with all the context, some decisions can lead to a stalled position, damaging for those that might otherwise benefit from execution.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't have some level of reflection, however. It simply poports that faced with a difficult decision, we should understand that we're only human and can re-evaluate any decisions we've made in the past at a future date.
While true surprises can be fun, they can also create heartache with those felt left out of the discussion floor. Not only does transparency enable us to mitigate problems with leaving out key members, but it also prevents silo-ing work from one another, aims to de-duplicate efforts early on, and keeps us accountable.
While integrity and growth can often live harmoniously, there exist many dark patterns in growth-first organizations we wish to avoid. Anything that might bring harm to our users, intentionally or otherwise, isn't part of our mission statement.
While a large body of work allows us to cover many topics, we want to allow our work to speak for us. Whether it be content, the quality of our site, or the type of community engagement we post, it's critical that our quality establishes us as innovators - those willing to push the boundaries of what's feasible.
While quality can say a lot about an organization and its goals, it cannot tell the human story behind the organization. We should strive to be explicit in our humanity and not be afraid to be vulnerable or level-headed when approaching how we communicate or expose our goals to our users.