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Substance Lab Playbook

Weekly structure

We're a consultancy; doing client work is our primary focus. However, we're also geeks, and playing/experimenting/building is what we thrive on. This means we work 4 days of the week on client work, while the last day (typically Friday) is for geek days.

If a week has less than five days due to personal time, vacations, holidays, sick leave, the geek day for that week is skipped.

Geek days

Geek days should be used for stuff that is somewhat related to the business or to self improvement. This could be

• Contributing to an open source project
• Creating an open source project
• Writing a blog post
• Learning a new technology
• Optimizing a workflow
• Improving internal tools
• Preparing presentations for user groups or conferences
• Helping people on Stack Overflow, Exercism or elsewhere.

Single Day Products

Every so often we'll use an investment day to build something, anything. The rule: It must be built and launched in a single day. Planning it before that day is acceptable, though. We keep a list of Single Day Product Ideas where we has out the ideas.

Workflow

Bugfixes

$ git checkout master
$ git pull
$ git checkout --branch ISSUE_NUMBER-ISSUE_DESCRIPTION

... make your changes and commit each change in small, atomic commits. When done ...

$ git pull
$ git rebase master
$ git push --set-upstream origin

Create a pull request on GitHub.

Development and languages

Code styles

Ruby

We generally follow GitHubs Ruby style guide.

A Rubocop configuration is available as part of our dotfiles project.

CSS/Sass

We generally write CSS using the Sass syntax. We strive to adhere to the guidelines from SMACSS.

A few guidelines:

• Colors are always hex, unless we need the alpha channel, in case rgba is used.
• Rules, selectors are placed in alphabetical order as much as possible.
• Place used mixins at the top to make it possible to overwrite their values.

Sales process

New customers are tracked on our Sales board in Trello.

1. Leads - Someone contacts us.
2. Contacted - Initial followup with a questionnaire.
3. Meeting - We have a phone call or have them come into the office.
4. Estimate
5. Proposal sent
6. Won/Lost