How to get domain knowledge

We’ve developed a few onboarding activities to give you a much deeper understanding of our domain. Understanding our domain, i.e. the platform and its features from our users’ perspective (i.e. domain knowledge) is paramount to both understanding our codebase and writing awesome code. Great code has a “small conceptual distance” to the domain. In other words, it brings cognitive ease when variables, methods, database tables, models, services, operations, and likewise come directly from domain-specific vocabulary.

Don’t expect to grasp/understand/remember everything you read during your onboarding. Look at it as a map which you can refer to down the road.

Read docs from /docs/domain

In our main repository we have 🔒 /docs/domain/ directory with README.md file for every system/module we have on our application. Such README.md files provide a brief overview of the system and usually contains links to other docs with deeper technical details. During onboarding, you need to read README.md files for every system.

Test email notifications

Go to the notification control panel on our staging/test sites (You can find the basic-auth credentials in lastpass). On that page, you will see information on how to test an email notification.

Please be absolutely sure you’re not on the production server but on a staging/test site.

Doing this activity can feel a bit grinding, but rest assured that it will pay off in the long run. It will make your work in the codebase considerably easier.