At Discover®, we embrace a set of practices promoting code reuse and collaborative development based on open-source principles. Our core values include community, contribution, and consumption.
Reuse is a foundational pillar of how we build and deliver products and services at Discover. In April 2022, our team in the Business Technology group created a clear strategy to make reuse a regular part of our engineers' day. To do that, we focused on three key areas: education, centralization, and contribution.
How we're making it happen
To start, we created educational materials, including learning courses, as a refresher on the benefits of reuse and to instill and reinforce a reuse mindset in our engineers as they executed their product work.
We created a centralized catalog for all reusable assets at Discover and diligently brought awareness to the community to reinforce that they should use it in their day-to-day work. Today, we are proud that our Reuse Catalog has more than 500 reusable assets that every engineer in Discover can freely access and use.
For contributions, we advocated during company events, in newsletters, and via interactions with our engineers that they should share their great solutions with each other through publication to the Reuse Catalog. In many cases, the content was already published and simply needed to be added to the catalog. This made it easy for our engineers to contribute back to the Discover community. It's because of these efforts that we have so many assets.
Plans for the future
As we look ahead, we're extending the work we've already done in some innovative ways. For starters, we constantly hear about similar problems and issues that our engineers face. We plan to start promoting community initiatives to solve these problems once and solve them for everybody. This will drastically reduce the duplication of work we see across our value streams and allow our engineers to solve higher priority problems — the ones that drive the most value for our customers.
Additionally, we plan to continue to refine the Reuse Catalog. We aim to simplify our technology landscape by bringing forth opinionated solutions that our engineers see first and most often. Focusing on content quality and consistency will help us ensure our engineers have access to high-quality, reliable solutions that address all critical site reliability engineering (SRE) components we truly care about.
We already have a documentation quality gate process defined, so we will keep moving towards implementing, automating, enforcing, and incentivizing it to further promote content quality and sustainability.
Conclusion
We are working hard to make reuse a valuable, everyday part of our engineers' experience at Discover, and we've laid the groundwork to get there. We know that building our team around the open-source principles of community, transparency, and contribution will ensure that we get where we're going faster.
