Move fast and break things is one of the founding mantras of Facebook and I think it defines a company culture that can apply to almost any technology startup. It is a culture who’s principles embody, promote and encourage communication, constant and fast iterations, tight feedback loop between the implementation and the design, short code-to-deployment cycles, experimentation and efficiency.
These are also just a few of the reasons why I chose to be a part of the Iconfinder team and to do my internship at a startup company instead of a traditional one. I have the perfect environment for rapid professional growth, I can acquire new skills and sharpen my old ones at a much faster pace, I feel challenged everyday and I have the pleasure of working with the newest technologies.
In this move fast and break things culture the break things, as I’ve come to find out, is not optional. To continue to improve you have to make mistakes from which you have to learn and my recent blunder is one of those mistakes. During the development of the new comment section a serious bug slipped through making it possible for attackers to hijack cookies from users. The bug was discovered and fixed under 2 hours and didn’t have any major repercussions apart from the inconvenience of clearing the session storage and having all users log in again.
I’ve learned a lot this month, some lessons where learned the hard way, from mistakes, but it’s been a fun ride so far and I can’t wait to see what the future will bring.
Some geeky statistics:
- Git commits: 101
- Git code line additions: 4.674 ++
- Git code line deletions: 1.430 —
- Coffee cups consumed: 82
- Number of times I caused chaos: 1
- Minutes wishing I was somewhere else: 0.5
Some of tasks accomplished so far:
- Created Vagrant machine to use for local development.
- Implemented a PayPal cash out option.
- Designed and implemented a new comment section, replacing Disqus.
- Created a Python script to generate a image sitemap.
- Integrated internal notifications into Hipchat, our internal communication application.
- Did various CSS and Javascript fixes.