Knowledge Vault
An internal knowledge base and documentation platform for engineering teams — structured for discoverability, built to stay current.
Knowledge Vault was an internal tool I built and led at Reading Horizons to solve a problem common to engineering teams past a certain size: institutional knowledge evaporating into people’s heads, Slack threads, and decade-old Confluence pages nobody maintains.
The Problem
Our team had documentation, technically. But it was scattered across three platforms, inconsistently maintained, and rarely reflected current reality. New engineers spent their first two weeks doing archaeology.
The solution needed to be fast to search, easy to write, and designed to decay gracefully — meaning it should be obvious when content is stale, not hidden.
What We Built
A Markdown-based documentation system with:
- Full-text search powered by Algolia
- Structured taxonomy for team-specific content areas
- “Last validated” metadata surfaced prominently in the UI
- A lightweight authoring flow that lived in GitHub — no separate CMS login
- Automated staleness alerts when documents hadn’t been touched in 90 days
Impact
Within the first three months, we saw a measurable drop in repeated questions to senior engineers — the kinds of questions that have clear answers but require interrupting someone to get them. That’s the outcome we were optimizing for.
The “Last validated” feature turned out to be the most valuable single design decision. Making staleness visible rather than hidden changed the culture around documentation maintenance.
Why Archived
The tool served its purpose and the team grew beyond it. The concepts informed how we think about documentation going forward, but the custom tooling was replaced by a better-resourced internal platform.