Values are the fundamental beliefs that guide us, motivate us, and drive our actions… [Good company values] have an opinion that you can understand easily and check against.
— Sarah Drasner, Engineering Management for the Rest of Us
Our goal is to make the Python ecosystem more productive by building next-generation developer tools — tools that enable developers to ship great software, faster.
We believe that developer tools and infrastructure are high-leverage, compounding investments that multiply the effectiveness of individual developers, teams, and entire organizations. A great tool can have an outsized impact.
Our values provide shared context and alignment as we seek to fulfill our goals:
We bias towards action, even in the face of uncertainty. We favor pragmatic doing over prolonged debating; we favor asking for forgiveness over permission. We value decisiveness — especially when a decision isn’t clear cut, and especially when a decision is reversible.
A bias towards action is not the same as recklessness. Rather, it’s a bias towards making responsible decisions and acting on them with urgency, even if we’re left with lingering ambiguity or known unknowns.
We believe that work worth doing is worth doing well. We strive to ship excellent software, software that users love, software that users trust — and we look to extend that same excellence to everything we do, user-facing or not. We should be proud of our software: what it does, but also, how it does it and how it came to be. Excellence is contagious.
When upholding craft comes into conflict with moving quickly, we cut scope. Do the most important thing, and do it very well.
We have finite resources and limited time within which achieve our goals. This requires focus. But nothing is more important than the health of our employees, families, and communities. Building for the long-haul means building sustainably. And building sustainably means recognizing the importance of own our happiness and fulfillment within and outside of our work.
We believe that openness leads to shared understanding and superior decision-making. We trust each other to manage the uncertainty of sharing openly. We bias towards open communication by default, and are proactive in that communication (sharing over waiting to be asked).
However, we recognize that open-by-default does not mean open-at-all-times.