The handover that actually worked, and the four I botched first
A handover is not a document dump. The test is whether the team ships without you in week one.
documentation
4 posts
The onboarding doc that doubled as a test of our own setup
If a new engineer cannot get running from the doc in a day, the doc is not the problem.
The architecture decision nobody wrote down, re-litigated four times
Without the rejected options and the reason, every new engineer re-opens the question.
A stale doc does more damage than a missing one
Documentation that is confidently wrong is worse than absent, because it stops the investigation. Three examples from one codebase and what made them survive so long.