Network Developers

This post is for any pet-enthusiastic tech or development-related folks on our network. Now our movie side is running a bit more smoothly, it’d be nice to get our development side in similar shape.

We have lots of plans, fun things to build for Petfans. We have a situation, if we can solve this situation it will be a big step forward. I’m throwing this out there to see if any experienced folks have any bright ideas.

“If you build it,
They will cum”

Maybe Kevin Costner

THE SITUATION

• Help with site and software development is always useful
• We get lots of offers of help from developers in our network
• The best quality work comes from people passionate about their work
• So then, passionate devs on our network would in theory build us the very best systems and allow us to get a lot more done
  
• People on our network often prefer to remain anonymous
• An anonymous developer from our network could be anyone, from stalker to hacker to authorities to worse
  
• For security, we don’t accept any development help from anyone, ever
  
• We use off-scene developers who aren’t passionate about petfun at all
• Repeat.

That’s been our development workflow from day 1. I think we can do better.

MORE ABOUT THE SECURITY

A small, trusted, on-scene development Team, all as passionate about Petfun as we are? Wow, we could build some amazing stuff. Development has always been a bottleneck for us.

Unfortunately, the thing that makes an on-scene dev attractive also makes them potentially dangerous. If someone undesirable wanted to get their hands on our data, they’d probably contact us as a dev. It happens often – ‘If I could just get into your server I could do X and Y‘. If not planning to steal data, then potentially stealing code or stealing content, backdoors, or malware – as a professional and ethical developer you get the idea.

PLEASE NOTE

I’m adding this bit retrospectively based on feedback we’ve received so far. Thanks for everyone’s feedback, that’s great and appreciated.

Before you answer – we know what a testbed is, and we have several. We know what permissions are, and we know how other organizations do it. Other organizations are usually not working with anonymous developers so it’s not quite the same situation. The MANAGER will potentially need access to everything, and that is the problem we are trying to solve first. Once that is solved, everything else becomes quite straightforward.

I’m really looking for input on ways to involve a potentially anonymous Manager (ultimately the answer might be that it’s not possible, so we might look at hiring only the Manager off-scene, for example). It might be that we use some tool to restrict the Manager’s access to everything – I suspect that will rather get in the Manager’s way, I could be wrong, if you have thoughts please let me know 🙂

IDEAS PLEASE

I have ideas but I’d like to hear yours. We have the people, we have lots of people. The right people? That’s the challenge. The situation is quite specific.

If you have thoughts or a solution to this puzzle, please drop us a line. This may be the first post in what ultimately leads to our development Dream Team, your experienced feedback would be appreciated. Thanks for reading 🙂