Early in a project, we have to decide which platforms we'll use. Which platform depends on our ideas for solving these users' problems. After considering what's best for users, the best tools for us have an active community, make us happy, and help us create and iterate quickly.
The majority of our development practices were first detailed in Kent Beck's classic Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. We've tried its methods and found that using most of the practices often improves the quality of our work and the happiness of our team.
We live in a magical modern era where many problems have already been solved for us. We focus on the core product as much as possible and outsource operations as much as possible to external services.