About the Tuft & Needle Engineering Team:
We view Tuft & Needle not as a mattress company that makes software, but as a software company that sells mattresses. We’re a small team of 3 passionate full-stack developers. We frequently seek out advice from each other and believe in continuous learning. We’re incredibly focused on results and don’t expect specific, regular hours in the office (we have a pretty sweet office though). Although sometimes we pair program, we aren’t religious about it. We believe process should be extracted from things that are working well. We aren’t philosophically against formal scrum sprints and stand-ups, but have found our team to work well without them so far.
Our Values:
Several months back, we sat down as an engineering team to decide on what our team values are that drive our decisions. The following are a few of these values to give a taste of what we believe as the Tuft & Needle engineering team.
- End-to-end ownership: Each project gets an Engineering owner that is responsible for the success of the project.
- Launch early and iterate: Done is better than perfect. Although we maintain a minimum standard of quality, we believe in getting value out of features and enhancements as soon as possible, while rapidly iterating.
- Do things that don’t scale: We believe that our software should automate existing manual processes to save time, rather than preempt potential needs to avoid building unnecessary software. Our litmus test for deciding on new features is “Has the team done this manually first?”. Of course, we’re pragmatic even about this value.
- Pragmatism: In a growing startup, our philosophy is that it’s important to be pragmatic. We are rarely dogmatic and use Judo moves to efficiently solve problems.
Our Technical Environment:
Our stack consists primarily of Ruby, Rails, Postgres, Mongo, Angular, CoffeeScript, HAML and SCSS running on Heroku. Our codebase has excellent test coverage and we have Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. Refactor without fear and ship daily! We also believe in leveraging quality APIs and tools. We use and love Stripe, CircleCI, Segment, Heap Analytics and Optimizely.