I'd be a bit weary of gaps in some environments. As you suggest, those gaps often exist for a reason.

From my experience a lot of those gaps are essentially integration efforts between two systems where one person builds something independent of the other that were supposed to be integrated or are now desired to be integrated yet were never planned or designed appropriately to integrate. In the end, you end up needing to become a master of the disjoint pieces that formed that gap to connect them and have to deal with two 'masters' as opposed to one.

My suggestion is to find gaps that aren't integration efforts, if possible, that are instead extension efforts. This allows you freedom of creativity for some greenfield development while avoiding a bunch of legacy code and technical debt that will swallow you whole. It also gives you a starting leap from something developed by a master to work from.

I can't count how many times I've joined different teams to assist and found a pile of integration efforts (my sample may be biased, YMMV). This seems to be a more common modern phenomenon where people need to pump out something to look good/productive and then coast away before the challenging effort of making things work together occurs. I would say this issue is exacerbated by the mass adoption of "agile" where integration is always an afterthought since business leaders are often the dictators.

> My suggestion is to find gaps that aren't integration efforts, if possible, that are instead extension efforts.

Yes! This can go even further and the technical integration work can easily slip into soft/people/team/project/management integration. Here is a talk which warns against doing this kind of glue work too early in your career:

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw

Summary article: https://noidea.dog/glue

Excellent video and summary, thank you for the links.

I explain this same concept to people at less software savvy businesses frequently, so it's nice to have an external reference to point to. Going to borrow her nomenclature.

> This seems to be a more common modern phenomenon where people need to pump out something to look good/productive and then coast away before the challenging effort of making things work together occurs. I would say this issue is exacerbated by the mass adoption of "agile" where integration is always an afterthought since business leaders are often the dictators.

For me it is the latter over the former. I would love to do a 3 point business feature every sprint and spend the rest of the time cleaning up code. Between the POs pushing work onto my plate, as well as everything else I have to do (releases, code reviews, fixing regressions etc.), cleaning up old code is a luxury at the moment.