Describe WHY we do things the way we do

[jsf9k]

💡 Summary

We do a decent job in this guide of describing the standards and practices we choose, but not such a great job of explaining why we chose them. We should make an effort to do so.

Motivation and context

In a dev team meeting today I mentioned that:

• Historically we do a terrible job of getting new folks up to speed. If someone is a strong self-starter then they usually do OK, but our current process strongly selects for self-starters.
• We have a difficult time getting contributors to read and follow the documentation in this repo.

It was mentioned that adding more explanation as to why we do things in the way we do might help with both issues.

[dav3r]

Perhaps we need to finish start this document: https://github.com/cisagov/development-guide/tree/develop/ethos