Classdojo

Collaboration is something we're big on, it's one of our core eng values. We do some variety of pair programming or mob programming pretty regularly. Onboarding is done with extensive pair programming. We also swarm on problems, so we don't have team members working on different projects, everyone works on the same thing, so we're always sharing context of what we are working on.

Work/life balance is very healthy for a startup. We don't use deadlines for anything other than the one we can't help when our back-to-school rush happens (Mid August through the end of October). We make sure to start that work early each year so that there isn't crunch time. After-hours work isn't encouraged or expected. Humanity is also one of our core eng values, and with that we prioritize making our lives better and not suffering through things that aren't working

Code reviews are done as needed. Anything substantial gets a review by someone else on the team, usually done immediately with a request on slack. If there's low risk, we'll push it and deploy and get a code review afterwards, so we don't block things on code review unless the author is concerned about something and wants feedback.

Ownership is shared by a team, it's another one of our core eng values. We want the team to collectively own their entire product so that they don't have requirements that are on other teams. Nobody owns the code to the extent that they can prevent someone else from working on it.

Roadmaps are owned by the team and we try to keep them small. Long roadmaps are never executed on in an organization like ours that is learning as they go, so we don't bother with a long and detailed one.

1) We're going through a lot of growth right now and we have many challenges involved with scaling our infrastructure.

2) Our software runs across three different platforms; web, iOS and Android. Keeping everything in sync and maintaining these presents many interesting challenges.