Companies who don’t define their driving force are missing the whole point.

There’s no I in team. It’s a cliche, but it’s true. And, while we all have things we’d rather do our way as an individual, the collective mind is more effective and more meaningful. At Monitive, it’s how we do business.

Once upon a time… er… site, there was a company called Monitive that loved uptime monitoring, solving tough problems, and talking about big ideas.

If you ever (have to) ask yourself “When is the right time to address security issues?”, you’re already late to the party. Security isn’t that layer that you just add on top of your application before shipping it to production. Security is a mindset, that constant voice inside your head which asks “Is this safe?” each time you code something that pulls data out of storage or changes structures based on a user’s action.

If you’re starting out a new project, don’t start with the Log In page [citation needed]. This is definitely not your core feature and there are a lot of other things to start out with. I know, it’s a cliche, but most developers want to start with the Log In page.

I personally know a few people that expressed their lack of interest in taking courses aimed at improving their skills in their field of work, even though they were free. For me, this just doesn’t make sense.

Each company wants to build the next unicorn. The next Facebook, the next Twitter, the next Quora. But this is rarely what they accomplish. I’ve seen it time and time again.

This is one of those things they don’t teach you in school. These days, it’s not only time-consuming to build everything from scratch, but also not wise. These days, it’s all about rapid prototyping, continuous integration and “moving fast and breaking things”. There’s no point in implementing a time and date Javascript library, as moment.js already does that job wonderfully.

The general advice I’ve been receiving in the past few years is that in business, it’s almost never a good idea to rewrite the core platform from scratch. Not even Uncle Bob, in his Clean Code video training sessions, recommends it.

And no, it’s not summoning a few Venture Capital rounds of funding to pour them into a business, nor wasting my life on vacations or my money on gadgets. “What makes us happy?” I have to admit I’ve pursued this goal for a large part of my life. I know that some form of success is linked to happiness, and I know that success is not that esoteric feature that only the gifted among us get to possess. Success, just like happiness, is something we all have.