[mdpye]

I hadn't realised it til now, but I do the same. It's a really great way to get started, because it tends to coincide with not having yet gained a broad range of responsibilities pulling you in different directions. You become a domain expert in something (which was probably lacking across the team) and peers appreciate it.

After they've seen that, you organically start getting invited to all kinds of more interesting projects and discussions.

[piva00]

I don't like to chime in with "seconding" on HN but I had the same eureka moment about it. I have definitely always behaved like that and it was just a natural and organic way to start in any team or job.

I got a bit shocked because I realised this behaviour repeated this past year when I changed jobs. I became a domain expert in an obscure part of the codebase and have been documenting it and sharing the knowledge for a while now.

[hinkley]

One of my 'secrets of my success' moments was realizing that one of the grind areas I reject has to do with the all of the processes of building the application. You stare at that stuff long enough and you might not know how the application does what it does, but you have a pretty good idea of where it does them.

And inasmuch as you've also improved the testing situation, you've also created a system that allows you to iterate faster, which you are intimately familiar with, allowing you to poke at the system in a way that provides you feedback on your hypotheses. Meaning you can learn about the rest of the system on your own schedule instead of being hand-fed bits of tribal knowledge (which often turns out to no longer be entirely correct anyway).