Welcome!
The Engineering Handbook is a practical guide for developers working at Human Made.
This site includes content which describes both how we work and how we want to work. But, it’s important to note that these are guidelines, not rules. One of the key aspects of Human Made is individuality. We often debate various things internally, and projects can have inconsistencies from each other. Sometimes, this is a good thing. The flip side of consistency can be monoculture, where experimentation is discouraged.
Engineers can often get caught up in issues like “what’s the best way to do this?”. While we obviously want to share our knowlege, and begin our work from the best possible starting position, there’s nothing to say you have to stay there. Take the best that’s available and run with it.
Experiment. Deconstruct. Rebuild. Blow it all away and start from scratch.
Some of the best projects come from a dissatisfaction with the status quo. If there are things in this guide you disagree with, fix them. Nothing will ever be perfect. Maybe something that’s annoying you today turns into a better tool for everyone tomorrow.
This guide is a living set of documents, and will be updated as we continue to refine, refactor, and rebuild our processes and tooling.
Contributing. Contributing.
This site is written and maintained by all of us at Human Made. Everything in the Handbook is in Markdown files in a git repository. So if you spot a mistake, omission or want to contribute something new, then open a pull request and suggest that change. Oh, and this applies to everyone, whether you’re a principal engineer or it’s your first day.
Ultimately there is no DRI (Directly Responsible Individual), but the Engineering Managers can perhaps be considered as ‘Guardians’, helping to create a resource that is valuable for the whole engineering team.
If you have any questions, ask in the #dev Slack channel or open an issue on the Engineering Handbook github repo., or speak to your Engineering Manager.
Key Sections Key Sections
Licensing and Reuse Licensing and Reuse
These docs are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, so you’re welcome to reuse any of our content.
These docs incorporate content from:
- WordPress.com VIP Documentation (used under CC-BY-SA 4.0)
- 10up’s Engineering Best Practices (used under MIT)
We’d also recommend reading these guides for everything we didn’t incorporate here to see how others do the same.