KBM a.k.a Knowledge Base Monterail - What Is It and How Does It Work?

When a company is small in size, knowledge-sharing happens quite naturally. You chat to someone at their desk, you overhear a conversation in the kitchen, or your leader mentions a new improvement they recently implemented in their project, during your 1:1.

As companies grow, knowledge-sharing is bound to grow with them. However, it’s not always so simple. 

One of the ways in which we tackle this problem is our internal knowledge base — Knowledge Base Monterail or KBM for short. 

How Does It Work?

The need to have more knowledge written down has become evident for us— the more people joined, the less certainty we had that the word-of-mouth will work as it did. We created KBMto fill that need and further share our company knowledge. 

KBM is a repository on our Github that acts as a encyclopedia but also a space for any technical and project related discussions. There are tech-specific guidelines but also announcements and github discussions.

Anyone can get involved, it’s not a place created only by one person, as one person never knows everything, right?

Our Head of Technology, Principal Engineers, Architects and leaders do their part by gathering the most urgent needs and setting a general path of how the KBM should and could look like — however, the topics are added by anyone with domain knowledge. 

All you need to do is open a pull request and propose a topic or idea you’d like to share with others and discuss. 

There is no ONE owner — the KBM is a living and breathing organism that develops, grows and changes, as more attention and effort is given. 

That’s why it's so important for you to get involved in discussions and forums. 

What’s in it for you?

First of all, KBM is one of the first things you’ll hear about during your onboarding to the delivery team. And onboarding is also a great time to get familiar with the knowledge base and learn our Monterail Way of doing things. 

The KBM includes many guidelines and best practices on starting projects, skeletons, etc. It also has tech/tool-specific practices about eg. writing in JS, or best practices of using Docker. 

It also includes high-level descriptions of our company-wide plans, links to project documentations, role descriptions in the delivery team and lessons learned from our project audits.  

Once you get familiar with it, you know our way of doing things, which a) might explain a few questions you might have about how something was done in your project b) will guide you to build apps the Monterail Way. 

This creates company-wide standardization and alignment that is crucial to keep the standards and conventions we strive to have at Monterail. 

KBM however, isn’t just about standards and alignment. It’s also about sharing your know-how and discussions that feed the cumulative knowledge of our developers whilst creating newer and better ways of doing things in our projects. Take a look at some example discussions: 

To KBM or Not To KBM?

KBM is only one of the ways we share knowledge (and keep it up to date) at Monterail. There’s even more going on with dev meetings, software architecture meetings, mobile dev meetings, and many more! 

Each one of those meetings creates an opportunity to learn something new but also to give back to others and that’s what knowledge-sharing is all about at Monterail. 

Discover your way with us.