Our operational policies, AI guardrails, contractor IP boundaries, production runbooks, and architectural templates governing team members, engineering squads, and client engagements.
Enforceable Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for production operations, error triage, telemetry, and deployment engineering:
Tactical Containment: Immediate response protocols for leaked credentials, compromised host instances, and volumetric DDoS abuse.
Security Post-Mortem: Mandatory blameless post-mortem report and POPIA Section 22 regulatory assessment within 5 business days.
Error Standards: RFC 7807 problem details JSON format, typed Strawberry GraphQL error extensions, and canonical gRPC status codes.
5-Whys Framework: Blameless iterative interrogation uncovering root architectural vulnerabilities rather than individual fault.
Taskfile Standard: Canonical build and deploy pipeline via go-task with single exposed gateway port architecture (pod-*).
Zero-Downtime & Rollback: Blue/Green cutovers, Expand-Contract database migrations, and a Sub-5 Minute emergency rollback runbook.
SLO Targets: Availability ≥ 99.9%, p95 latency < 200ms, p99 latency < 500ms. 100% error budget depletion triggers deployment freezes.
Standard Probes: Mandatory implementation of /healthz, /health/liveness, /health/readiness, and /metrics.
Client Project Dependency: Production SLAs, operational SLO targets, and uptime commitments contracted with clients are customized based on project tiers, architecture complexity, and agreed contractual requirements, and exclude upstream cloud, telecommunications, or third-party infrastructure provider outages outside PyCentric's direct control.
Webhooks: Cryptographic X-Signature-256 HMAC verification, async queue delivery, exponential backoff, and dead-letter queues.
gRPC & GraphQL: Schema-first Protobuf (buf), client deadlines, interceptors, and Strawberry DataLoaders for N+1 prevention.
Organizational policies governing equipment, artificial intelligence, intellectual property, and developer workflows:
Approved Stack: Google Gemini & AI Studio, local Ollama, Antigravity, OpenCode, and internal tools. Third-party APIs require prior CISO approval.
Data Guardrails: Strict ban on unanonymized client PII in consumer AI. Mandatory static audits (bandit, trivy) with zero copyleft contamination.
Hardware Baseline: Locked bootloaders and full-disk encryption. BYOD contractor devices require encryption and 5-minute screen locks.
Emergency Revocation: 15-minute centralized session revocation across Google Workspace, GitHub, and cloud vaults for lost devices.
IP Boundary: 100% assignment of all work product created under PyCentric engagements. Contractors retain 100% ownership of pre-existing tools.
Conflict Duty: Mandatory binding duty to disclose competing projects or commercial conflicts to compliance at the earliest stage.
Behavioral Standard: Radical candor with deep respect, zero tolerance for harassment, and PRECCA anti-bribery compliance.
Whistleblower Protection: Confidential reporting channel directly to the Managing Director and Corporate Governance.
Margin Guardrail: Enforces smallest model sufficient for the task (local scripts → Gemini Flash → frontier models) with hard token ceilings.
Circuit Breakers: Automated failovers and Redis caching layers to maintain ≥ 70% gross margins across all AI workloads.
TDD Mandate: Strict Red-Green-Refactor cycle with ≥ 90% backend domain coverage and ≥ 80% frontend UI coverage.
Static Analysis: Linear git rebase history, zero warnings on ruff, ty, bandit, vulture, flutter analyze, and zero em-dashes.
3-2-1 Backup Rule: RPO ≤ 1 hour and RTO ≤ 2 hours with AES-256 encrypted offsite archives (AWS S3/GCS) and quarterly drills.
Out-of-Region Vault: Asynchronous database replication to European secondary zones to preserve integrity during regional blackouts.
Zero Plaintext: Pre-commit gitleaks blocking, zero .env files in git history, and 90-day production credential rotation.
Offboarding Protocol: Mandatory 15-minute de-provisioning sequence across cloud providers upon engagement termination.
Email Masking: Mandatory GitHub no-reply email aliases (ID+username@users.noreply.github.com) to prevent scraping of developer PII.
Contribution Gating: Three-tiered contribution gating (DCO for utilities, ICLA for core libraries, CTA for dual-licensed assets).
Mandatory Inspection: Formal 7-gate PRR inspection and standardized Keep-a-Changelog Release Notes for every Major, Minor, and Patch release.
Verification Gates: Enforces TDD coverage (≥ 90%), static security audits (bandit, trivy), zero-downtime DB migrations, 3-2-1 backup verification, and 90-day comprehensive warranty initiation.
Authoritative operational templates and architecture standards governing incident response, testing, and business continuity (codified in docs/templates/operations/):
Psychological Safety: Amy Edmondson's model treating human error as a symptom of brittle systems. Eliminates hindsight and outcome biases.
CI Regression Mandate: Mandatory automated regression test committed within 24 to 48 hours reproducing the failure before ticket closure.
Low Cognitive Load: Engineered for on-call crises with copy-pasteable CLI commands (task targets), expected exit codes, and branching logic.
Emergency Rollback: Automated sub-5-minute rollback command (task deploy:rollback) and circuit breaker activation.
Empirical Decisions: Two-way vs one-way doors (database engine migrations, multi-tenancy models). Requires evaluation of 2 to 3 realistic options.
Trade-Off Matrix: Weighted scoring across performance, maintainability, cost, and explicit acceptance of negative trade-offs.
Test Pyramid: 70% Unit (≥ 90% backend, ≥ 80% UI), 20% Integration (testcontainers), 10% E2E UI and load tests (p95 < 200ms).
Defect SLAs: P0 Blocker (2h fix SLA, 0 permitted at release), P1 Critical (6h fix SLA, 0 permitted), concluding with a signed Release Certificate.
South African Resilience: Engineered for Eskom Stages 1 to 8, cellular tower battery depletion, and undersea cable disruptions.
Power & Connectivity: Minimum 6-hour LiFePO4 battery power budgets, dual-SIM LTE/5G router failovers, and offline-first client sync.
Deliberate Practice: 90-day learning worksheet mapping competencies across the 4 epistemic quadrants (Knowns & Unknowns).
Fogg B=MAP Habits: Anchors 30-minute daily learning routines immediately after morning standups, backed by 25% R&D sprint capacity.
Seven foundational operational processes governing project delivery, commercial trade-offs, and company cadence (codified in docs/corporate/06-operational-processes-and-governance-roadmap.md):
Defines P0 (Blocker, 5m MTTA), P1 (Critical, 15m MTTA), P2 (Major, 60m MTTA), and P3 (Minor) severity levels, automated paging rotations, and Incident Commander war room authority.
Enforces zero Friday afternoon releases, scheduled maintenance windows for high-risk changes, and mandatory Expand-Contract zero-downtime database migrations.
Protects fixed project budgets, timelines, and margins. If a client requests a new feature mid-sprint, they may swap out an unstarted backlog item of equal effort or execute a formal Change Order.
Guarantees 90 calendar days of comprehensive defect remediation at zero cost for reproducible bugs failing original SOW specifications, while clearly distinguishing out-of-scope enhancements.
Maintains ≥ 70% gross margins via tiered model routing (Flash models for classification/formatting; Pro models for complex reasoning), semantic Redis query caching, and hard token budget caps.
Mandates SOC 2 Type II or ISO 27001 certifications and POPIA Data Processing Agreements before onboarding any third-party SaaS tool processing client or company data.
Daily async Slack standups by 09:30 SAST, Tuesday/Thursday maker time protection (zero meetings for engineers), and weekly Monday morning 60-minute executive C-Suite alignment reviews.
For contractor IP disclosures, conflict of interest declarations, or security incident reporting:
Email: compliance@pycentric.co.za
Emergency Hotline: WhatsApp Incident Channel
