Core principles

Our core principles are things that we are going to stick to (and should be accountable if we ever violate). As time goes on, we may also add new principles if they are especially important to us.

User¶

The user at the heart of our design. A lot of people may say this, but when we say it, we mean it. How can you believe us? We're not here to make a profit -- in fact, we don't make any money whatsoever. We're just doing this for the fun of it

Here's a couple of examples: - Create a terms & conditions document that is meant to be read (short, concise and free of legal jargon) - Listen to what our users want and act on it - Make the app quick

Some users may like the social network experience -- seeing what their 'real-life' friends are reading. But not all do. Social networks also have associations with privacy concerns. How are we different? For starters, we're not pushing the social network experience on anyone. We're making it opt-in; by default, you can just use it a service to discover and catalogue books without any of the distracting social network elements.

Privacy¶

We're spooked by what and how much data the big tech companies collect, so we're not going to make the same mistakes. A simple test here for us is if we didn't create the Book Project, would we be comfortable using it? We'll be collecting as little information as possible from our users

Sometimes, we're led to believe that user privacy comes as a compromise to building an amazing service. We don't buy that.

Here's some things that we're against: - Adverts - Asking for too much information like a user's address or full name - Tracking cookies - Google's reCAPTCHA, Google Analytics, etc. - Sign in with Google or Facebook

Transparency is key here. Whatever we do collect will be documented in a concise easy-to-read format. If our privacy policy is pages long, we don't see that as being transparent. It needs to be easily and quickly digestible, otherwise few people will read it.

Simplicity¶

Simple but feature-rich & customisable:

Goodreads has a lot of customisation, but it sometimes comes at the expense of simplicity. When there is a trade-off to be made, simplicity should be preferred over customisation
Balancing being opinionated in what the user needs with allowing the user to customise things to their liking

Good-looking UI¶

Since appearance is in the eye of the beholder, it will hard, if not impossible, to please everyone. We're trying to make it look as good as possible for as many people as possible.

Solidly built¶

The other principles are mostly about the end-user. This principle is about our code.

Write good, clean code that's maintainable. Includes frequent refactoring and adhering to principles like SOLID
Use the best tool for the job, not just sticking to what we currently know
E.g. Vaadin is not the best framework for us, so're switching to React

We may slip on this from time to time. That's fine as long as we pick ourselves back up and ensure we're constantly learning how to write better code and design a better system

Welcoming¶

We're building a welcoming community both from the open-source development viewpoint but also within the app.

Changes¶

In the interest of transparency, we will list and briefly explain any changes to our core principles here.

We initially planned to allow for both signing up with a username (for privacy reasons) or an email address. However, for the time being, we've decided to only allow registering with an email address. This is to make it easier for us to verify accounts by sending confirmation emails, which can help mitigate against people creating 'fake' accounts. It can also help users reset their password. However, if there is sufficient demand for signing up with a username instead of an email address, we will revisit this decision and look at how we can handle our concerns above. We are still committed to our users' privacy.