Why we treat craft as strategy
Careful engineering has a small cost at the start of a project. This note shows how it lowers the cost over the life of the system.
On our projects, craft is the cheaper option. The savings arrive later, so they are easy to miss.
Every shortcut has a cost
The cost of a shortcut comes later. It can be a bug that nobody can reproduce, or a deploy that nobody wants to touch. It can be a month to train a new engineer, because the one engineer who understood the system left.
When a team skips the care, the cost moves downstream. There it grows, and it falls on engineers who did not take the shortcut. With craft, a team pays a small cost early to avoid a large cost later.
What craft looks like day to day
Craft is a long series of small choices:
Each choice is small. Over a full project, these choices keep a codebase easy to change.
How craft keeps a team fast
A clean system is fast to change. With good boundaries, a new feature touches one place in the code. With honest tests, a team can move fast, because it knows when a change breaks something.
A team that skips craft slows down with each release. We measure speed over the full life of a system, so every project we take on gets this care.
