Welcome to the documentation repository of Vizzuality's backend group.

We are aiming to collect here documentation that can help us in our daily work, and also help us improve our collective ability to deliver quality projects efficiently, onboard new colleagues and deal with our functioning as a group.

Ultimately, can we consolidate the group's expertise through lean documentation of anything that is worth keeping in mind in new projects, so that we can build on each others' strengths and knowledge, have to figure out less from scratch, and focus more on the unique added value of our projects and less on those lower-level mechanics which are not particularly unique?

We are just starting this in February 2020 and we'll have to figure out things as we go.

Some ideas so far:

• drafting our onboarding process

Some of us have been working with Sebastian on this - we could consolidate our onboarding-related documents, checklists, etc. in here.

• hiring

As we learn what has worked well or less well through successive rounds of hiring, and streamline the process through this, we could gather here some essential notes so that we can reliably repeat a hiring experience that is good both for the candidates and for us and Vizzuality in general.

• taking part in cross-functional-group activities

As we figure out what works best for us in terms of being part of activities such as budget conversations, capacity planning, advice to other groups (for example, working with BD on new proposals) and so on, we could document here anything that we can rely on to make sure we make good use of the limited time we may have for these non-project activities.

• functional design and implementation notes

Anything that we have had to spend time on to figure out from first principles because nobody had done it before (at least in Vizzuality, and if common solutions used elsewhere would not apply in our contexts), lessons learnt from past projects - what worked well, what not so much, in which context, and why/how...

All of this could be worth documenting so that we can look back at past experience and continuously build upon it (and gradually improve it, but starting from solid foundations!).

Importing or exporting data at scale, common sensible security measures, complex authorization workflows, interfacing with external services that require some special tricks, SRE that makes sense (and isn't overengineered for the sake of it)... any of this and much more could be useful to document where appropriate, if it can make the job of our future selves easier (and make us happier).

Some of this could be short READMEs or other forms of documentation, and we could reference code examples or libraries that we could reuse, if relevant.

For now, let's not worry about the bike shed.

We can try to add some initial content with some lightweight structure or none at all, and then review things as we go.