I'm always thinking about "Can I (or anyone) get back into this easily 6 months from now?"

In my situation, I probably will have to do that so there's a selfish reason there for sure.

I recently had a whole series of frustrating situations where I dug through rediscovering how old code / systems work to make small changes or to find out the small change was enormous. Really deflating stuff. It's not my fault but it can be so demoralizing. Feels like a weight on you... I was done for the day after both of those horror shows.

Then yesterday I had a 3 day project start and in 2 hours I ... did the thing. It was super flexible / powerful, handled errors gracefully, and easy to change / test. All because a year ago someone (well myself and anther person) took the time to simplify the original spaghetti code that originally existed and break it into more digestible functional-esque chunks. Dropping something "in between the chunks" (fancy technical terms here) was easy to do, test and read. Completely the opposite experience, it was energizing and fun.

For my consulting, I primarily practice "reference first architectures."

The idea is we identify the rough shape of what we are going to build and the components needed to deliver it (Linux? Terraform? K8S? HTML/CSS/JS? etc.).

Next we measure up what we can "take for granted" for the engineering skillset the organization hires for. Then we pick books, official project documentation, etc. that will act as our "reference." We spend our upfront time pouring ourselves into this documentation and come away with a general "philosophy" of an approach to the architecture.

Then we build the architecture, updating our philosophy with our learnings along the way.

At the end of the project, we commit the philosophy to paper. We deliver the system we built, the philosophy behind it, and the stack of references used to build the system.

What this means is I can take any engineer at the target level they hire for, hand them the deliverable and say "go spend a week reading these, you'll come back with sufficient expertise to own this system."

It also acts as documentation for myself for future contracts if I get brought back in. Prior to starting the contract I can go back in and review all of those deliverables myself to hit the ground running once I'm back on the project.