Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Start Where You Are: Perfect security is the enemy of good security. Begin with basic practices and tools, then improve iteratively. Even simple steps like enabling GitHub security alerts or adding basic SAST provide value.

Invest in Education: Security training for developers pays the highest ROI of any security investment. Developers who understand security write more secure code than any tool can enforce.

Make Security Visible: Security work often goes unrecognized. Make security contributions visible through dashboards, celebrations, and career advancement. What gets recognized gets repeated.

Plan for Scale: Security practices that work for 10 developers may break at 100. Design processes and tool choices with growth in mind. Automation and self-service become critical at scale.

Embrace Transparency: Share security practices with customers and the community. Transparency builds trust and often reveals improvement opportunities through external feedback.