“Saying the quiet part out loud” is a phrase I’ve just made up, to describe a method of building alignment on practices within a team. It’s the habit of stating why you are doing things a certain way, even when you would assume it’s obvious.

Anyone writing code professionally in December 2021 will remember the “fun” of the Log4J vulnerability. For those that weren’t - this was a critical security error that allowed attackers to run any code they wanted on your servers. The root cause was a logging library, Log4J, that is used by most projects that are writting in Java.

It’s usually used to write code something like:

log.info("Process completed successfully");

which will then appear in your logs, allowing you to track your application’s behaviour. Pretty innocuous stuff.

“Institutional knowledge” - the information that a company collectively knows - is a familiar concept to anyone involved in hiring processes. When an individual leaves who has knowledge the organisation needs, companies will organise offboarding sessions to keep that knowledge within the institution. Maybe they’ll even try to hire someone with similar experience.

Lots of companies similarly try to optimise for “Institutional learning”, especially smaller firms. This makes a lot of sense - smaller companies don’t have the resources to buy in extra experience, so they focus on rapidly expanding the experience of their existing employees. It also fits really well with the agile philosophy of fast development cycles to maximise your knowledge about customers’ needs.