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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Learn Any Domain Quickly

Published 3 days ago • 2 min read

Team-Driven Developer

A newsletter with tips and tools for building software as a team

If you’ve ever joined a new team, tackled a legacy codebase, or stepped into an unfamiliar domain, the feeling can be overwhelming.

There’s too much to know—and not enough time to learn it all.

That’s why I use a model I call traversing the knowledge graph. It helps me orient quickly, pull in the most relevant context, and start contributing with confidence.

In this post, I’ll describe:

  • How I think and model my internal knowledge graph
  • Why the concept of strongly connected components can help you learn faster
  • How I use my knowledge graph to help me ask better questions and expand my knowledge

Let's dive in!
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Team-Building Exercise

As you learn a domain or team, a key piece is also aligning to make sure your understanding aligns with the rest of your team's understanding.

When you have a misalignment on things like ownership, team structure, goals, etc., it can keep your team from all pulling in the same direction. When you aren't pulling in the same direction, it slows everyone's progress down.

As part of your Team-Building exercise this week, pick a few team members to share your knowledge graph with (you don't need to share the exact graph, but share the core strongly connected components you see and some of the relationships) and get feedback.

  • Do they see the same relationships?
  • Are you missing what they see?
  • Do they disagree with your graph as a whole?

Then use this as input to correct and refine your graph to gain an even better understanding.

The goal isn't to have a perfect graph; that’s impossible.

The goal is similar to Domain-Driven Design: over time, your mental model will be refined by the models of others, and your model will refine others' as well.

As you build that shared understanding, you'll get more aligned. That alignment will then help your team execute with more speed and discipline.

Here are some more resources from me to help you build better teams!​

  • 📕 Code Review Champion - My book on code reviews will help you become a world-class code reviewer. From giving kind feedback to navigating conflict, this book can help anyone wanting to sharpen their code review skills.
  • ❓​Questions for Devs - Building a team takes more than catching up about your weekend at standup. I've used these questions to build relationships with my team and push past the same old surface-level conversations.
  • ​📋 Pull Request Template - Maximize your efforts in pull requests by giving context right at the beginning of a new pull request. Copy and paste this template into your repo, and voilà!
  • 📊 ​Code Review Metrics - Start measuring how your team tracks against a few common code review metrics. This python script will pull your GitHub pull requests and generate a CSV you can slice-n-dice to get the data you want. It also has graphs! As this is an open-source project, your contributions and feedback would be great!
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Dan Goslen | The Team-Driven Developer

Helping software engineers build better teams

Learn the tips and tools for building software as a team! Every other week, I send a long-form article, a team-building exercise, and resources to help you build better software teams so you can build better software.

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