Reduce complexity for the team
Have thought and wrote before.
But since I just finished reading a book. Want to see anything new learnt and can be applied.
The major challenge is people comes and goes.
Software stays.
But similar things are handled differently and likely takes more time, and new complexity baked in.
People bite by outages left the team.
People understand the system left the team.
Inconsistent is normal, consistency is exceptional.
Maybe that’s reason why big companies and leadership like the terms, defragmentation, consolidate, unify, consistent etc.
List a few important things or ideas in my mind:
- Curate docs. To reduce cognitive load, share knowledge, and improve consistency.
- Training. With curated docs.
- Simplify interface with external teams.
- Make things generic. Avoid adhoc patches.
- Develop generic tools that’s needed in many different places or needed frequently.
- Migrate to generic infra.
- Improve consistency everywhere, including but not limited to implementation, methodology, documentation, process, communication.
- Make these things attractive for each team member.
Maybe the next thing I should ask my team members to do, refresh g3doc such that I know how to handle alerts, where to check jobs, runtime and quality stats, system healthiness, important design docs, past launches, active workstreams etc.