This last weeks I’ve been working alongside Skim and Enrique. We worked on a project that has been developed by more than a dozen teams, and for more than a couple years. It is huge.

I never experienced that immense sea of context. I’m used to be comfortable with a codebase before doing significant work on it. That means spending significant time looking at the code and making a mental map of the pieces involved. But in this case, it is impossible for me to grasp all the details.

Skim, recognizing my problem there, said: You only need to learn enough context to achieve the task at hand. It is the only way one can face those tasks. It would be a waste of time and effort to learn concepts that may not be necessary.

On the other hand, memory works by visualization and concept association. The more related things you have associated and visualized in your mind, the easier it is to remember them. The easier they are to remember, the more effort you can spend on solving the problem instead of recalling things. I didn’t realize I was depending heavily on that until I had that ability restricted.

My following efforts on that situation will be finding an effective technique to create those incomplete mental maps.