Values and principles

Values

Ambuda’s mission is to make the Sanskrit tradition radically accessible. Radical access is Ambuda’s core value, and it affects not only the project as a whole but also how we design and nurture our code and community.

From a community perspective, radical access means that we communicate openly and visibly about our project. For us specifically, it means that we send out regular project updates on our mailing list, track technical work on GitHub, and have more open discussion on Discord. Everyone is welcome to join in on our ongoing discussion.

From a code perspective, radical access means that we build in public so that everyone can see how our project is doing and participate in it themselves. It means that we bias toward obvious and boring technology that anyone can read and understand. And it means that we take care to write code that is clear and simple.

From a data perspective, radical access means that we rely on open and public data and produce open and public data in return. Although licensing rights often prevent it, we strive to release our texts under a CC0 (public domain) license.

Principles

Ambuda’s tech stack follows a few basic principles:

1. Our readers care about our content and features, not our technical stack. All of our technical work should be connected to a clear user problem. We must not build features just because they’re interesting technically.

2. The hidden enemy of any tech project is complexity. Unless there is a very good reason to embrace it, we should keep complexity low in all parts of our project.

3. Our core team is an ever-changing group of volunteers with various backgrounds and skills. When in doubt, we should prefer simple, well-known, and well-documented technologies that have been repeatedly tested in production systems.