“When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. It wasn’t an absolute rule; if it had to be the second day, that was OK. But if it slipped to the third day, I started to worry. Generally, we’d let them pick their own bug to fix, or, if necessary, assign them something small. As we got better at this, we realized the smaller the better. Either way, it had to be a real bug and it had to be fixed live, in production. For some, this was an absolutely terrifying experience. “What if I take the site down?!” was a common refrain. I tried to make sure we always gave the same answer: “if you manage to take the site down, that’s our fault for making it too easy. Either way, we’ll learn something interesting.”—Lessons Learned: Fear is the mind-killer (via igrigorik)
