Hospitable Codebases

And things are going swell. You're shipping features left and right. No code review needed, no teammates to slow you down.

Suddenly, you have to work on this codebase with other people. Their eyes: glazing over the same gnarly code that you hacked together.

You want your new teammate to have a good time. To invest in your teammate, and make them as productive as you – without them judging your code behind your back. Twice as many devs; twice as many features shipped per sprint.

Well, you're in luck. Because in the rest of this blog post, I go over 3 principles that you can immediately apply to your codebase, so that you can onboard any new teammate without friction.

So you could just sit your teammate down in a room, draw out the architecture for your application on a whiteboard, and it'll stick! Right?

Without a firm mental model of a system's parts and interactions, your teammate doesn't see the forest for the trees. They won't have any idea how their code fits into the big picture.

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