Jake Worth

Jake Worth

Use a Dev Email

Published: January 29, 2022 2 min read

An engineering technique I recommend: when you sign up for any service, even on a side project that’s just getting off the ground, create an email group called dev@<your-domain.com> that forwards to you and any other technologists, and use that email to sign up.

I’ve worked on dozens of projects where the founding programmer signed up for every conceivable infrastructure service— think AWS, Heroku, Google, Facebook, etc.— with their personal email or individual work email. The problems this causes are many.

Even if that programmer never leaves, it robs the team of power because services are authenticated by an email account that only one person should ever have access to. And when that programmer does leave, it’s even worse. You either have to track down the rogue employee to initiate a transfer, or you have to sign up for a new account and perfectly match the settings on an account you can’t access.

Signing up for accounts as dev— you probably are going to need it.

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know!


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