We realized how much knowledge was undocumented, and that soon it will start to create a gap we won’t be able to bridge anymore.

Barak, Engineering Manager at Venn

Venn, the innovative mobile app that connects neighbors, communities, and businesses, has been driving human connection across neighborhoods, and even more so after the first wave of Covid-19. With $40 million raised in 2019, Venn committed to expanding its R&D capabilities. Now, they’re tripling their 10-people engineer team and needed a solution that would help them share their tribal knowledge with newcomers.

Barak Drechsler, Engineering Manager at Venn, shared how he scaled developer onboarding with Swimm (and quickly!)

“We realized how much knowledge was undocumented, and that soon it will start to create a gap we won’t be able to bridge anymore.”  Venn uses a sophisticated and complex stack, consisting of Graph QL, Node, React and React Native. Onboarding to it is no easy feat.

“We wanted to scale our team, but we understood it would be very difficult to onboard new engineers without the right tools and methodology. We needed to find a solution that would help us quickly start documenting our knowledge and then optimize it in the future.”

All aboard: a documentation hackathon!

Venn heard of Swimm and saw our Twitter feed, and decided to start with a PoC for Continuous Documentation. “We decided to go for it, and found out Swimm was everything we needed in a continuous documentation platform.

Venn was very happy with Swimm and decided to expand the PoC and integrate Swimm into their development workflow.

“New onboarded developers are already enjoying the results. Our onboarding process has become a lot better following our implementation of Swimm and we’re planning to streamline the process so we can continue documenting incrementally as our codebase evolves.”