How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase

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How to Join a Team and Learn a Codebase

I have switched teams more often than I have had to implement an AVL tree, and you can guess which one of those two was taught in school. I wish someone had taught me how to join a new team! While learning a new codebase can be daunting, I've found a few things that work for me.

Don't trust default timeouts

Modern applications don’t crash; they hang. One of the main reasons for it is the assumption that the network is reliable. It isn’t.

Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer

There was only so much I could do to improve my coding skills. Most blogs epousing techniques to write cleaner code, repeating yourself, not repeating yourself, etc. are micro-optimisations. Almost none of them would make me instantly impactful.

The Impostor's Advantage

Performance reviews had just ended, and it was time to meet my manager and be told my results. Except I knew what it would say. How else do you rate a programmer who doesn’t code?

Bridging the Gap Between Junior and Senior Engineers

Code review etiquette, gracefully pushing back on scope creep, explaining highly-technical issues in a way that intuitively makes sense to every other department, maintaining your composure when production blows up and it’s a race against the clock, etc.