The Good Eggs Software Development Manifesto

At Good Eggs we are on a mission to grow and sustain local food systems worldwide. Everyone in the company is here because they believe in this mission and our vision for a better future.

So how does this apply to our work as an engineering team and what other core values keep us aligned, excited and productive? We took some time to articulate our values as a team which I am presenting here as a first draft of our Software Development Manifesto.

We believe

We believe that technology can be used to make the world a better place.

We believe in building beautiful things that improve people’s lives.

We believe that when given an opportunity to create positive change, you act on it.

We believe in the value of exploration and innovation.

We believe that reshaping our food system is a direct way to care for people and our planet.

What we do

We create change

We’re building software to power a new, alternative food system: One that supports high-integrity farmers and foodmakers and enables them to compete with the industrial food complex. A system that helps all families eat well and enables them to support the future they want to see. A system where the folks doing things right are the ones who succeed.

We make real things with real impact

Yesterday we were writing the code for a new application now being tested by local farmers. Tomorrow we’ll be collecting feedback and improving on it. We’re constantly delivering new experiences and tools into the hands of our customers and producers, all of which are designed to make their lives easier.

We’re tackling hard problems

Working with food is complex with lots of variables to solve for, from weather patterns to traffic patterns. We’re innovating across the worlds of online retail, inventory management and delivery logistics to name a few, and are constantly working to make our systems and processes work even better.

How we do it

We use radical tools for radical change

We’re members of and contributors to an open source community that is defining new ways to build applications with Node.js and full stack JavaScript. We’re adventurous and use technologies that inspire us to innovate and solve problems in new ways.

We stay nimble

We work quickly because the faster we can get a solution in someone’s hands, the faster we can learn how to make it better. We test and automate with rigor so that mundane tasks don’t slow us down.

We continuously improve

There is no best way, only better and better ways. We’re building systems that handle complexity in the real world by creating visibility at every stage of the process. We’re empowering the people involved to solve problems when and where they happen.

It’s the technology at the heart of Good Eggs that will enable us to scale and make real change. We’re using technology to think big in service of the small. We’re building the systems that help local farmers sell enough to actually make a living. We’re creating efficient logistics that mean parents can trade a trip to the grocery store for time to read the kids another bedtime story. We’re fueling a food system that will feed everyone well, and we’re psyched to be doing it. Because the better we work, the better the world we all live in.