#The Hitchhiker's Guide to Holly Engineering

Don't Panic. This is the map of how engineering at Holly works — how we plan, build, review, ship, and operate software. Start here for how to read and contribute to the guide, then read Values for what we optimize for.

#What this is

The single, canonical reference for how engineering at Holly works. It's descriptive, not aspirational — it captures how we actually deliver today, and it changes the way our code does: by pull request. Product plans and priorities align to this operating model.

#How to use it

• New here? Read this, then Values and Ways of Working.
• Unsure how we do something? The answer is here, or it's a PR away.
• Each chapter has an owner and a "last reviewed" date. Unowned docs decay.

#How it stays alive (not shelfware)

• One home, one link. This repo — no competing Notion/Confluence copies.
• Docs-as-code. Change by PR to the chapter owner, not by decree.
• Descriptive first. Document how we actually work today, then ratchet.
• Wire into tooling. The doc enforced by tooling survives; the rest decays.

#The map

Status: draft = real content, still moving · scaffold = placeholder, awaiting its first pass.

#Foundation — who we are, how we operate

• Overview — what this is and how to use it (this page — draft)
• Values — what we optimize for as an engineering org (draft)
• Ways of Working — team norms, communication, ownership (scaffold)

#Lifecycle — idea → shipped

• SDLC (scaffold)
• Definition of Ready (scaffold)
• Definition of Done (draft)
• Release & QA (scaffold)

#Operations — running in production

• Incident Response (scaffold)
• On-Call (scaffold)

#Security — keeping it safe

• Secure Coding (scaffold)
• Secrets & Access (scaffold)

#Architecture — how we decide & describe the system

• Architecture — ADR practice + system shape (scaffold)

#Craft — how we build

• Engineering Standards (scaffold)
• AI Development Standards (scaffold)

#Elsewhere in docs/

• templates/ — blank forms (PRD, ADR, postmortem) the chapters link to
• adr/ — the architecture decision records themselves