FounderQuest

The honeybadgers have been busy this week! Ben, Josh and Starr each have work that shipped this week that they want to brag on. This episode strides over vast expanses, covering issues like compliance, open-source marketing and content marketing. It all builds up to a big reveal at the end, where we finally announce a new Honeybadger effort: the RailsConf Indie Lounge.

Full Transcript:
Starr:
Can I tell you the nerdiest thing that has ever happened to me, that I've ever done? The nerdiest, most embarrassing thing that I've ever done?

Josh:
Sure, as long as this isn't reciprocal.

Starr:
No, it's not reciprocal. It just reminded me of that. When I was in junior high, I was a super big computer nerd. It was the 90s, the mid 90s, so that wasn't cool back then. It wasn't seen as some sort of path to fame, riches, or anything. There was a song, it was really popular, I think it was by INXS and it was called More Than Words. It's this really sweet love song, something about my love can't be expressed by words and I was like "this is how I feel about my computer."

Ben:
Nice.

Starr:
See, I'm editing the show this week so I feel safe. I feel safe disclosing that because I can just edit it out if I want to.

Josh:
And you were listening to this on, what would it have been, CD probably?

Starr:
The radio.

Josh:
The radio? Wow.

Starr:
No, the radio. Yeah.

Josh:
When did we switch from cassette tapes to CDs? I don't remember.

Starr:
It was around that time. There were definitely still cassettes around. People still had cassette players.

Josh:
Yeah, but definitely wouldn't have been MP3 downloaded from anonymous FTP server or something. That feels like five years later.

Starr:
Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. Are you from the future, Josh? Are you some spaceman from the future?

Josh:
I am, actually.

Starr:
Okay. So, we didn't fully discuss it but we discussed it in chat a little bit, talking about sort of what's been going on. It's been a pretty eventful week, we've shipped a lot of stuff, we've had some stuff happening on the job search front. Is that what you guys would like to do?

Josh:
Works for me, if that works for Ben.

Ben:
Sure.

Starr:
Okay. What should we start with?

Ben:
Let's start with the most boring part of the week.

Starr:
Oh, really?

Ben:
Yes. That was the most of my week, which was writing policies.

Starr:
Yeah?

Ben:
Yeah.

Starr:
I'm sorry. You seemed a little bit low energy too. That makes sense now.

Josh:
It's funny because the most boring part of my week was reading Ben's policies.

Starr:
Oh. Sick burn.

Josh:
Ouch. Sorry.

Starr:
So, what are these policies and why are you losing so much of your life force working on them?

Ben:
We are working on Site2 compliance. We have customers who would like to get our Site2 report and we don't currently have one. We'd like to have one because all the cool kids have one. The idea being that a Site2 audit gives you the stamp of approval that you're running your business in a way that's secure and does things that big boy businesses do, I guess. A lot of part of the compliance is, you have to define how you run your business through policies and then the auditor comes and checks that you're actually running your business like you say you are. We have a lot of things that we do at Honeybadger just because that's the way we've always done them, that's our MO, but this is actually documenting those processes like, how do we select a vendor? We actually do care that our vendors have security policies and we follow up on that. All these policies that I'm writing and getting done, basically just put into words exactly how we run our business.

Josh:
Yeah and we're mostly doing this so we can work with customers that require this, right? I think we've been finding that it has been a helpful process to actually go through and document these things just for the sake of having it. It makes us think about how we do things.

Ben:
It's a good feeling. It's a good corporate hygiene and it's nice to be able to say, yes this is what we believe at Honeybadger and we're putting our signature on the line saying this is actually what we're doing.

Starr:
I feel like in early years it would've been a much more simple policy document. It just would've been like, I do what I want.

Josh:
Just shrug.

Starr:
Yeah. Whatever.

Josh:
The shrug emoji didn't exist back then but it would've been the ascii version, or whatever.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
The text one.

Starr:
Oh, that's too complicated. You have to use lots of characters to make that one.

Josh:
You can figure it out.

Starr:
No, I can't.

Ben:
Just use /shrug in Slack.

Josh:
Yeah, well. This is probably before Slack though. Campfire, maybe.

Starr:
Yeah, so...

Josh:
Sorry, Ben, I didn't mean to say that I was bored out of my mind with your documents.

Ben:
That's totally fine.

Josh:
To be honest, it's not your first choice in reading, I would imagine, for anyone but I think it has been enlightening in any case to learn some of these large business practices and terms that we're not typically exposed to. And if all the cool kids do this and all the cool kids are rich, then we definitely want to be like the cool kids.

Ben:
Definitely. The thing that's been interesting, though, as I've sat back and looked at some of these things and in light of the hiring that we're doing right now, it is useful to have all these things on hand for the new person that shows up. For example, one of the policies this week is the Change Management policy, which defines how we do software development at Honeybadger. We've always said it's a pretty loose process. We're pretty independent and that sort of thing but we actually do have some controls in place to make sure that we don't put bad code in production.

Ben:
We do pool requests and we do require someone else to review big changes and we do have automated CI/CD. We do have a way to revert changes, right? So, all of these little bits of how we do business are now documented and when a new hire shows up, it'll be easy to point that person at a document and say here's your 30 second introduction to how we do things at Honeybadger.

Josh:
Nice. We could probably also summarize or copy some of this stuff into our handbook then smooth over some of the legalese areas. We probably don't want to just send them to all of our compliance documents. It would be like, okay your first week is also reading our compliance documents from start to finish.

Starr:
Yeah, and you know we'd have to quiz them on it to make sure they actually read them. Otherwise, nobody would really read them.

Josh:
We could have an 80 question, multiple choice quiz on each document.

Starr:
There you go.

Ben:
Well, I mean, there is a policy that says that everyone has to receive these policies and sign off on the handbook and things like that.

Josh:
Yeah. Nice.

Starr:
You know how people are with stuff like that. It's like the terms of service on every software application, that I'm sure we've all read in detail.

Josh:
Yeah. Well we could probably summarize it for the handbook and then link to the long version or something like that too. Just so they receive them.

Starr:
By the way, I'm officially stating that I'm not undermining our policy that all employees have to read the appropriate documents. I'm just being a smart-ass.

Josh:
We'll speed that part up, like they do the small print on radio...