Dec 8: Guiding principles

This is the eighth post in the Fastmail Advent 2024 series. The previous post was Dec 7: Revision of the Core Email Specifications. The next post is Dec 9: Building a blog.

When it’s a week before December and you suddenly remember “oh yeah, we were going to do an advent blog series” — it does help to have some pre-written material! So I’m cheating a bit and pulling from our internal Notion, getting the words we’ve already spent a bunch of time honing.

I wrote last Sunday about our Mission Statement. A mission statement is all well and good, but it’s very high level and aspirational. It needs to be distilled down to something that’s actionable and useful on a daily basis.

So we wrote the following:

Our guiding principles

How we go about achieving that vision is also very important to who Fastmail is as a company. We feel these principles really capture how Fastmail has operated as a company in the past, and should do in the future.

We are a good internet citizen

• We believe in open protocols, standards and interoperability.
• We build, share, and support technology to make email better for everyone, not another walled garden.
• We foster positive relationships with our customers, partners, suppliers, and staff.

This is also one of our public values. We encourage our employees to contribute to open source projects, to be involved in the technical communities in their local area, and to be involved in the standards development process.

We build the future

• We are not content to just accept the status quo.
• If the right tool doesn’t exist, we make it.
• If the open standards aren’t good enough, we improve them.
• We are leaders in our industry.

Yes, we’re a bit “not invented here”. We maintain the Cyrus IMAP server. We built our own Javascript framework and email editor. We buy our own hardware made to spec for what we need, and manage everything from the operating system up.

We like to make things ourselves, because then we understand how they work; which leads into the next point!

We seek understanding

• We are curious about how things work, and how they came to be.
• We seek deep and actionable understanding of our systems.
• We recognise that we can’t understand everything, but strive to know where the boundaries of our knowledge lie.

We really don’t like unexplained behaviours in our system. If we don’t know why it happened, that’s a problem! It’s this attitude which led us (see the past point) to debug and then replace the skiplist database format in Cyrus.

We’re not writing our own filesystem or operating system though! At least not this week.

We value discussion

• We reach agreement through constructive, iterative collaboration.
• Everyone is encouraged to express their theories, and explain the basis on which they are formed.
• We test our assumptions against the real world.
• What works is more important than who thought of it.

We really believe in confirming theories against reality. Nothing beats a good hypothesis, and a well constructed experiment to determine whether it adequately predicted what happens.

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These principles really do reflect how we think and talk about ourselves at Fastmail. We live by these every day.

There have been times when we have considered that we need an additional principle “We get shit done”, which is in a degree of opposition to both “seek understanding” and “value discussion”. That’s the thing with principles like this, they are a tradeoff between different valuable properties. These are the ones we choose to prioritize! So we discuss, we understand, then we do.