How to Keep Your Hard-Earned Engineering Lessons Forever

Knowledge drives you, why lose it when you change job?

Why would you want to lose knowledge, patterns, and strategies that worked in the past?

You don’t.

But this is exactly what happens when you move from one company to another.

In today’s email, I’ll share a strategy you can use to implement successful solutions elsewhere.

Let me describe a scenario for you:

1. You and your team worked for months on a challenging engineering project.

2. You faced many obstacles, refactors, and performance issues.

3. And you finally succeeded.

During that experience you learned and collected multiple:

• Patterns.

• Strategies.

• Processes.

• Best practices.

After some time, it’s time for you to move on to new opportunities. What happens with all that knowledge?

How can you tell your work at a company is basically DONE?

Even if you have a great memory, you won’t remember everything.

And that is the problem: how to remember things that worked for you in the past.

You already put in the effort, so why lose it just because you changed companies?

This happened to me many times, and I struggled to remember what I did in “X company” years ago that I could apply again today.

And yeah, you cannot copy/paste code from your former company into a private repo/cloud-storage; That’s ilegal, unless the code is open sourced.

But you can copy/paste:

• Patterns.

• Strategies.

• Processes.

• Best practices.

Which is exactly what you learnt, and which is exactly the important part.

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Now the magic question:

Marcos, I want to save that knowledge too!

Here’s what I do. I use visual tools to store the knowledge. I’ve used a couple:

• draw.io. This was my first choice before Excalidraw.

• Excalidraw. I like it very much because I’m very fast at creating something. Also, it works really well offline or with low bandwidth (me working on the train).

Example of pattern draw in my Excalidraw

You draw your knowledge. The knowledge is not copyrighted by companies (unless patents or similar).

So next time you need to remember or browse whether a previous solution might fit your current problem, you just access that visual memory, with the following advantages:

1. It was drawn by you in the past, so you’ll understand it now too.

2. It contains the general idea at a level that’s enough for you to understand what was done. Implementation details are not needed.

Hope this little trick can help you from now on.

Do you have other tips that could be useful for people when switching companies? Write them in a comment!

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