The Equifax hack is likely the greatest theft of personal data ever with 143 million American consumers impacted, 44 million in the UK and I’m sure many more around the world.

Equifax didn’t get hacked because they lacked engineers. Equifax didn’t get hacked because they were unaware security was important. Caring and having resources is not sufficient.

The relentless exposure of the insecurity of our government, security & corporate infrastructure, across the world, makes plain that an entirely new culture and approach is required to bring this under control.

Our early, target demographic at Chill Code is engineers & designers at startups and web development firms that want to outsource infrastructure designs to communities that have the ability to iterate those designs in such a way that they evolve and respond to shifting needs and threats. The collective wisdom of a community with respect to the immediacy of response, the perspectives that shape change, and the perspectives that validate or invalidate alternatives is capacity far beyond an individual developer.

This wisdom has layers.

1. Design is transparent & iterative.
2. Iteration is constant.
3. Intractable disagreement is resolved through forks – code and community.
4. Community and time tells us the winner.
5. Deployment is constant, driven by automation.

This is no more than the established wisdom of the development and DevOps communities.

What should be plain is that large firms require the same capacity – and that capacity needs to be deeply incorporated into their philosophies. Corporations need to stop thinking about what they do as ‘special’ or ‘different’. Where once, organisations like banks, had ground-breaking technologies, today they sorely lag the startups defining the new approaches. The security issues facing everyone require collective responses in the form of community patterns for infrastructure and deployment and the capabilities of the communities patterns trumps by far the value of bespoke design and secrecy. All of this driven by automation that is baked into the solutions for threat detection, notification & patching.

The alternative is you keep inventing your architecture. You keep building partial solutions with limited review. You let egos and secrecy continue to dominate. And where you do achieve something positive and original – hell, why not keep it to yourself?

Of course, as a technology community, we’ve long known the right way. This is the very reason why open source has triumphed. It is the same reason that GitHub has triumphed. Community delivers better technology solutions.