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Knowledge Conf 2019. Hard to be Kolei: Theory and Practice of Knowledge Sharing in Lamoda. - Alexander Afenov (Lamoda)

Report from Knowledge Conf 2019

This is a story, but not a fairy tale, and in the abstract case of a young developer named Nikolai, you will learn how Lamoda’s IT department solves problems:

  • onboarding;

  • accumulation of knowledge and expertise in the team;

  • Disseminating knowledge and news about the department/company/state of business;

  • Search for data and contacts through Confluence;

  • Internal conferences and public meetings.

And much more about how a large department employee learns important and new things about projects, tasks and neighboring teams.

Important thoughts from this report:

  • wiki is good to have team space (about the team and environment) and project space (about features and product);

  • It is good to make meetings induction (long, expensive, informative), tech onboarding (process details, technical stack);

  • It is useful to give work in the field (visiting the warehouse and studio);

  • you need to convey the rules of registration of commits (see also the principles of smart commits - i.e. those by which you can find a connection with the project, ticket, etc.);

  • you need to convey the principles of deploy - are depleting tickets (which incorporate everything in the release), if so - then how;

  • Lamoda has a telegram channel: "radio deploy FM", where bots write about assemblies;

  • It is useful that there are RFC (request for change – i.e. individual tickets for the approval of dangerous, important things that have contracts, database structure, infrastructure services, etc.);

  • It is important to keep transparent calendars (large migration, planned downtime).

  • It is great if there are events IT gathering (presentation: successes, failures, goals);

  • Lamoda has mandatory test notes from developer to problem.

  • It is useful to have a template for describing the task, Lamoda has this: Why + What + DefinitionOfDone.

  • It is possible to hold events of the format:

    • Team lead talks (weekly between teams)

    • Tech Crunches (Internal Workshop on Processes and How Everything Works)

    • It fest (to increase engagement, to pump the platform);

  • The presence of architectural committees helps beginners (transfer to new technologies);

  • ownership (I did it, I invented it, product care, collective responsibility)

  • A strong DevRel can help beginners (push knowledge out)

  • Collectively debriefing incidents also seems to speed up onboarding.

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