System Hacker's Principles
The FSFE's System Hackers is a group of people that maintains the organisation's servers and services. As such, the striven level of trust, reliability and mutual understanding is very high.
Therefore, we try to follow a number of principles for our work. These are abstract, but define how we want to interact with each other and the systems we care about.
Keep it short and simple. Our resources are limited. Therefore, efficiency and effectiveness are crucial. We do not need cutting-edge technologies meant to scale to thousands of server.
Incremental changes over complete redesigns. Running systems can be changed, but only for good reasons.
Communication is key. Before starting to work on something large, ask the other team members. It is likely they have constructive feedback.
Respect others' work. As experts in our area, it may be that we disagree on specific solutions and implementations. If you think a system owned by another member can be improved, make a friendly suggestion – and tolerate, if it is not followed.
Teamwork. Avoid doing solo adventures, but include others that can help you setting up and maintaining systems.
Documentation, documentation, documentation. Every bit of knowledge and experience that you write down is an investment into the future. Think about what happens if you stop being a System Hacker from one day to the next.
Furthermore, as all FSFE teams, we follow the Code of Conduct. And obviously we only run Free Software services.