Any tips, help, books? Thanks.
1) Take over all the admin stuff you can to free up your devs from distraction and pointless tasks. Productivity and morale will immediately go up. My guys were time reporting into 3 different tools (and this is a <10 person startup!), I just started writing a summary of our standups and told them they didnt have to do it individually any more, it was appreciated and mgmt still get the info they need. 2) Start with infrastructure stuff - how do you deploy, what's your build process, can anyone on the team draw an architecture diagram (mine couldn't) 3) Write tests, it's low risk changes to the codebase so you cant really break anything, but it'll give you the black box overview of how everything hangs together, detail will come in time 4) Accept that there's no way to immediately get to the level of familiarity the guys who built the system will have. I can spend 2 hours digging trying to find how widget x gets its props passed in, or I can ask my teammate who wrote it and immediately known which file and line its on.
Burp has a broader scope because it does fuzz-style random testing. Zap is more reproducible. (Burp can be a pain in the neck because it doesn't reliably retest stuff it found.)
Be gentle with your new developer colleagues as you present them the results from these tools. They almost always find a couple of more-or-less silly vulnerabilities.
I'm skeptical that management would need a daily status.
They really have no idea what they're doing.
How are these deadlines getting set?
If you've got critical bugs live in production, "management" may be the ones ensuring all the hot potatos are in fact being handled by someone - that nothing is falling through the cracks, that everything is being addressed, that QA is on top of testing hot new changes that need to be rolled out ASAP. Daily isn't frequent enough in this context.
Burning through the QA backlog leading up to a big release in ye olde milestone driven waterfall style schedule? Daily might be frequent enough.
Long term feature work? Might be able to go weeks between updates - but a daily ping of "still working on X, still on schedule" takes what - 5 seconds to email, 5 seconds to read? Helps keep the mental burden of juggling everything in your manager's head down, maybe helps reassure them you're not going to pull a "so yeah, we've still got a month of work left at least" on delivery day when they're reporting up to their management. They might not be able to help you get your task done faster, but they might be able to rearrange other parts of the schedule to keep their stakeholders happy (e.g. X is running into delays, but we can give you Y ahead of schedule). Even if they can't do anything to help the schedule, they can start managing expectations ahead of time, prevent unseemly "surprises."
And hey, daily status reports are better than daily status queries.
Have a high-overview webpage where they can look it up by themselves if they need to. This is faster than daily and gives much better and accurate info. It's your task to communicate the metrics, scheduling problems, cost overruns and feature creep.
The thing is, it's all about visibility. Can management look at your sprint board, either physical or online, jira agile board for example, or in some other tool, where they can see what's going on? That's a good place to start.
Who keeps this up to date and well maintained? I see little fundamental difference between pushing metrics/status via JIRA and pushing via email. Both scale (or don't) just as badly. Both require distraction from your development tasks to properly estimate or summarize status/problems.
Don't get me wrong - keep the daily distraction the hell in check. But there's no magic bullet to make good communication free, and there are plenty of people and contexts where words and language work way better than attempting to abstract things with stats and metrics.
> This is faster than daily and gives much better and accurate info.
Maybe for you. Maybe for me. Definitely not for a lot of coworkers I've known. They do not context switch from "this is harder than I thought" to "track down the JIRA task and change my estimates". Getting some of them to even log work done is like pulling teeth. Hence hacks like the daily standup - poll, use words, get the real status.
Plus of course improving the infrastructure. This is also mostly in the same poor shape as the docs.
Of course you can ask people who are more familiar but whether you end up helping or being a distraction then is an open question.
Ask on your team's IRC channel.
Benefits:
(1) You only really need to know the system as a user, not the codebase as well, to do this.
(2) Well, #1 was a bit of a white lie. You'll end up finding out about all the (possibly undocumented) runtime dependencies this way, spinning up throwaway VMs and databases, etc. If the project is in production, this will be very useful knowledge, since you're probably the last point of escalation for strange prod issues.
(3) Running this out of CI with throwaway VMs/containers will also force you to fully automate the install and make the damn thing actually work on a generic blessed OS configuration, which might be a huge boon to your team if you currently are in "Works on my machine" hell. I did this somewhere where we had tons of lost productivity because developers used OSX or Ubuntu on their workstations, but prod was RHEL, and the most fascinating deviations would be found by developers chasing the strangest of bugs. Making the install reproducible so we could have CI totally ended this.
(4) If you don't have this already, and you set up infrastructure to gate commits on this test passing, team love and productivity will rapidly go through the roof as suddenly your developers aren't spending half their time fighting each other's build breaking changes.
So yeah, it's just one thing, but it leads to so many benefits it's definitely where I would start.
EDITED: Added an item to the list
* How important the code path is. It might really be some boring code that you will never touch or don't need to understand anyway.
* How much time you have. This point is really important if you're reviewing some code.
Seriously, the most useful thing I've ever done is just refactoring half of a project to see how it works.
This is a good way to cut the velocity of whole project so you don't look as lost though.
Nah, I usually just do a feature branch, refactor items with better stuff and we can then cherry-pick anything that's sexy and still fits our business needs once we've talked it over.
I'm sure that they appreciate it, but that's not necessarily the same thing as it's good for the team in the long run.
But the answer is brilliant cause it also gives him the ability to see what his team is working on and how they are working on it.
As an IC basically my entire life, I have joined large legacy projects many times, and my typical attack strategy always revolves around a large cup of coffee and my trusty debugger. Using 2 monitors, starting at main() or index.php (or whatever of course), I will execute as much of the entire codebase as possible line-by-line.
At first I will blast through the code looking at general structures and entry/exit branches and the like, and note things and often breakpoint sections that seem hairy or where I can note inefficiencies or great design.
Then I slow down the stepping and really examine the heavy-lifting sections to try to become familiar with the style and abstractions being used.
This method has served me well, as more often then not, by the first day's afternoon I can be having intelligent conversations with the existing team, almost always much to their confused surprised.
I suppose it matters much if you are going into the senior position as really strong head-down coder or as really more of a project management liaison.
Not being much into the management side of things, I don't have much advice on that role, and your suggestions sound really smart.
Pretty sure it's because they assumed IC was Individual Contributor but to downvote the "least common answer" is weird seeing as how, in this case, it's the source...
My approach to learning a new codebase has always been to do a general overview of the structure while taking notes. Then just assign myself some easier bugs and start working on them, and then slowly moving up in complexity.
I regularly am recommended to "read through all the docs, step through all the code", which might work for some. My brain just wants to switch off whenever I do that.
Instead a day or two of fixing problems - implementing a fix, seeing how/why it doesn't work, trying a new one - suddenly I get it.
Everyone's different.
If you become a waterboy, you will definitely be appreciated by the team, productivity & morale will go up etc - But you personally didn't sign up to be a waterboy! You came to be a player. So play.
You can't go from being a standup-summarizer or infra-support-guy to your regular senior developer role. If you are any good at those ancillary roles, you will be playing those roles for a long time. Every day doing infra is a day not doing regular dev - that's just the way it is. I have been there & its not fun. These ancillary roles have a way or morphing into a fulltime job, and soon that's what you'll end up doing.
This isn't WMA/CAA where you start in the mailroom and few years later you become Hollywood's top producer greenlighting 100 million $ movies. It simply doesn't work like this in tech companies.
On the other hand, if the team were peers in the org chart, I agree with you.
Start by having someone on the team give you a brain dump. Record it. It doesn't need to be high quality. Use Quicktime and your laptop's webcam.
After the braindump, write out everything that was said and make the following diagrams:
- Architectural diagram showing the components involved.
- Infrastructure diagram that shows where things run.
- Deployment pipeline that shows how code gets from git commit to production.
- Data flow diagrams for the most common usage patterns. This one might come a bit later as you're more hands on in coding.
Show the diagrams to your team members as you create them and ask them to verify that it's accurate. If it's not, understand why and fix your diagram.
Add the above to your onboarding docs. If none exist, create it somewhere.
Add a page to onboarding docs that describe how to access logs.
Add a page that describes how monitoring in the system works.
Add a page that will act as an index for recipes on how to do useful things. From that page, create a bunch of useful scripts that you gather as you learn stuff daily. Encourage others to do the same.
I think you get the picture. Add a page for everything you need to know in order to be productive. Think about all the things you knew how to do in your previous position. Try to document how to do all those things in your new position.
Soon, before you know it, you'll be productive and you'll enable your team to be able to onboard new team members more efficiently.
In addition, write code and review PRs. Ask a lot of questions in PRs. Investigate how things work. Get curious.
X can be user hashed passwords, server's certificate keys, etc...
Since you're new, you don't necessarily have all the insight to make this happen on your own. So ask your team! "What can I do that would make everyone more efficient."
Also, make it clear that you are available for general questions on technology, architecture, algorithms, secure coding, etc. I spend one to two hours each day fielding questions like this, and I don't have a lot of in-depth knowledge of our code. But all code needs architecture and algorithms and security best practices. And since I don't have to actually spend the time coding, I'm multiplying my capacity to make decisions. It's also great for developer ownership, when I get to say things like, "I can give you general advice, but you know your code the best. So apply it with discresion."
This is an excellent quote and I plan to use it, or a close variant. Thanks very much for sharing!
Along the way, you'll of course need to talk to people to understand both the code that has the bugs and what is expected of it, and you'll learn years of history from both the development side and the product side, which is invaluable.
It's unusual these days that I just grab a feature or a hotfix and knock it out - generally only the ones too big and scary for anyone else to handle, and my guys are good enough that those are pretty rare.
Be aware that to do this in a time-efficient way, you might need to pull in one of the existing engineers who can give you the lay of the land.
I try to go in with an open mind and assume the developers who went before were at least competent and had good reasons to do things the way they did. Sometimes this charity is unfounded, and the code truly sucks, but usually some poor decisions can make sense when you have more context.
Ultimately, I just dive in and start fixing bugs or implementing features. I'll start with the build to understand what the project actually consists of, then I rely heavily on shell tools like grep and find to explore the code.
I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal ticket, and he wasn't talking. It used auto tools so I converted it to cmake so I could build locally. Then I spent about two weeks just reading the code, started at main() and wrote everything down in an architecture doc on the wiki (file and method level, only document method internals that were really hairy). Then as enhancements or bugs came up I'd flesh out the doc some more.
Another time I inherited an old IE6-7 app that had to be modernized. Besides the MS specific stuff, it was a mess of javascript spaghetti. Again here, I had to figure what files where actually used by the app, so I grepped log files and browser network logs to figure what was actually loaded, and just read the code. The first major project I did was to remove many hundreds of unused files.
I am interested to know what happened to the "old timers" meal ticket?
That means you'll get productive in same way you'd become productive as a junior. Pick up easy tickets and use them to learn to navigate the codebase. Talk to your colleagues and fill in your knowledge gaps. Help others who are having issues. Pick up and address more tickets. Get in the thick of things as quickly as possible.
If the position includes additional roles, such as that of a PM, nail down the necessary role requirements and start doing those as well. You'll need to work on your soft skills - honey and vinegar, carrot and stick, etc.
You're a senior developer because of your experience and knowledge in general, not because you're magically a productivity machine. Assumptions are going to be your biggest hinderance when coming in to your first "senior" position. Don't assume that you know more than your peers, even the junior ones; when you first start they probably know more about the codebase and tech stack than you do. Don't assume that if a team works differently than what you're used to, it's automatically worse. Don't assume that their code quality and engineering practices are poor.
Don't assume; find the reality and work with your team from there.
Your job is simple: get to work. You don't invent "important senior work" for yourself as a way to prove your merit with your ego, before you have settled in and earned your title. You pick up existing tickets from the queue. The only way to get acquainted with the project and its stack is to begin working on real tasks that require minimal modifications to the codebase. That's your goal: commit and deploy small chunks of code that accomplish something useful for the business. You need to take the time to organically discover each subsystem, one at a time, as you complete tasks that actually close tickets. A senior developer's initial job is to be a "junior developer" who knows nothing about the project, taking the time to learn the system bit by bit.
Progressively pick up enough knowledge in order to eventually be in a position to assist other developers and make decisions about the project's future. After 1-3 months, depending on the size and complexity of the project, you will have touched a majority of subsystems while working on tasks. You will then have a comprehensive understanding of the system as a whole, and may be considered informed enough to take some amount of control over the future direction of the project.
tldr; Your job as the newest senior developer on a team is not to be perceived by others as a senior developer. Your job is to act like a senior developer, and that means taking the time to integrate yourself at a reasonable pace. The "Senior" prefix to the title does not kick in until you've worked on the codebase long enough to fully understand it.
Apart from that, I can only recommend to play with the tech stack in a throw-away prototype before using it for real, because the first decisions you make in a project tend to be those that are hardest to change later on.
Approach the task with humility. First observe, participate and learn, then come up with improved practices.
Mistake 1 - Was too focused on committing code and getting my first PR merged. I wanted to prove I could commit code quickly, and that PR is missing a lot of things and had to be patched later.
Mistake 2 - Not asking for (enough) help. I did a short pairing session that got me up to speed, I should have asked for a few more. I also should have asked "What's important in this code?" I had to learn that the hard way.
Mistake 3 - Ignoring the full release lifecycle. On day 1 you should first learn how issue management works, and then how the software is released to production. Releases caught me by surprise, and I ended up having to put hotfixes in.
Mistake 4 - I let QA become a second class citizen. Find out who and how your code will be QA'd, and try and be active in that process.
Mistake 5 - Ignoring important "sub-systems" as they didn't seem to directly pertain to my work. For instance, I knew we had a feature toggle system, and I was told I didn't need to use it for my work, but looking back, it would have been nice to know and use. I also was told to ignore end-to-end tests since my work was so small. Well guess what held up release because my code broke it? Yep, end-to-end tests.
Mistake 6 - Modifying code without reading tests and understanding the underlying data. A lot of people have mentioned this, and it can't be emphasized enough. A lot of tests have mock data at the top, why ignore that, it tells you what the code is working with. 'Describe' blocks tell you exactly what methods are supposed to do and what's important about them.
So, I made a lot of mistakes it seems, but the most important thing I did right was this:
Whenever I realized a mistake, I fixed it and I moved on. I didn't let it get me down, and I won't make that mistake again. That's ultimately what a good dev is, someone who can red/green/refactor their mistakes with minimal oversight.
What this means is you want to start with figuring out goals. What is the project's goal? What are the constraints? Why are things being done the way they are? What does success mean?
Once you know that you can start doing tactical stuff (and since answering those questions can take a while you can probably do lots of other stuff in parallel, as discussed in other comments).
Two relevant practical talks, from PyCon that was this weekend:
1. I gave a talk on how to choose how and where to test your software (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaq_e7qUA-4&t=63s).
2. Awesome talk on how to structure documentation - prose version at https://www.divio.com/en/blog/documentation/, video version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azf6yzuJt54
I'd take the time to ask each member of the team, what they are working on, what problems they are having, and how you can assist them in some way.
The product your company/team is building will have a roadmap of features to be delivered, spend time with members of the Dev team talking through each of those features, what is required, how they plan to build them.
As a senior, you may not know the platform, but you can get to know how the team works, offer suggestions and identify probable pain points. There might be entire sections of code you can work out that needs to be written which don't necessarily require knowledge of the platform.
All this will take time, be incredibly useful for everyone and in your spare time you can learn about the platform.
Its often easy to dig into the code as that is familiar but that probably wont be what you'll be judged on down the track.
Also being new with a tech stack is enough of a handicap to keep me busy getting to speed, so adding quality and better engineering practices had to wait.
Actually, the first time that I found myself in such a situation, I later regretted I had not invested much more time in learning the framework so I could had detected bad design that later slowed us.
There's an interesting side-effect of this practice if you've got less-experienced devs on the team: it can encourage them to also ask more questions more confidently.
If you're not actively engaging them for input, insights, etc. then you could be short term smart and long term foolish.
Even as a serious dev you're still 75% manager, and, at best, 25% leader. Your duty is to put your people into a position to succeed. And until you know it all (sarcasm), they're going to have thoughts and feelings on what that future looks like.
If you are the bridge between business and dev, you have to manage business expectations and point what needs to be changed. If you are the technical guidance of the team you have to be on top of code quality and architecture.
In the end, the role name doesn't really mean a thing, it's what is expected of you and your legroom that matters. Both are dynamic. In fact, every team member is free to suggest improvements, how fast they are implemented just depends on who approves them. Senior normally just means you don't need alot of supervision.
Now, take a step back. How easy was this? It should ... must... be absolutely frustration free. If not, fix that.
To come up to speed on the tech stack, go sit with the other developers. Get a feel for how they are using the technology. Then, start picking off some smaller issues from the backlog and try and fix those.
Don't make assumptions. Learn the tech without an opinion. Sure, you won't like some of it (nobody likes everything), but find out if the team likes it. If they do, don't try to change that.
Yes, it's a nice way
You need to exercise skill of being able to do an organised exploration of the codebase, probably producing documentation along the way.
If I'm unfamiliar with the code base I start by trying to break things. When I do this I'm looking for missing assertions, invariants, or incorrect assertions. I create tests for those. I fix them. If the project I'm working on is smart enough to use property-based testing I look for weak invariants, serializability, or missing assertions. The end goal is to understand the module by exercising it and adding value at the same time.
If the code base isn't using property-based testing or has no tests at all I will find a way to add them. It gets the ball rolling for adding some issues to the tracker and provides real value.
Keep a journal of your experiences coming up to speed. Once you've grasped a certain corner of the code base review your notes and build some documentation for that code. It will help on-board new developers the next time they come to that code base.
As for introducing best practices, as a senior developer, you'll have to build consensus with the rest of the team. In my team the difference between a senior developer and a team lead is the ability to communicate ideas and build consensus around them. Learning how to influence people is the hardest part about building your skill as a senior developer. Senior developers become leaders when they can communicate a proposal and immediately build in feedback from the team and turn that into a real change to the code base, product, and business.
Firstly, accept you're not going to be productive immediately as you don't have the project and business context. This is fine. Resist the urge to redesign everything, bring in new technologies and practices until you understand what is going on. Your instant reactions and conclusions will not be attuned to the needs of the project - so practice humility. Socially you may be used to knowing more than anybody else about the system you work on. Don't forget how much hard work this was to achieve the first time and get ready to do that again - but better :)
Secondly, understanding you won't be contributing at a senior level to the project immediately, focus on learning the stack. One senior developer we had whose task was to do an integration of an open source program, got bogged down for months due to disliking the scripting language most of the backend was in. To learn a stack, make your own throwaway end-to-end projects. If you don't understand the stack, you won't contribute at a senior level.
Thirdly, make sure to regularly commit code to the project. Of course, you have to talk to surrounding teams, customers, etc., and learn to cut releases, and so on, but most important is regularly contributing so as to get a feeling for who on the teams understands the system and what the real development process is like. Easy ways to make quick code changes beyond bugfixes: improve logging and metrics (also great for getting an overview of how things work). To support your suggestions for new practices and stacks: gather and document data about the real issues (regular causes of incidents, etc.) and build relationships. In time, the value of an experience transfer is huge - but the value of scattershot rewrites without context is hugely negative. Good luck!
Often, the people who grow up with a mess don't see the issue because they learn it a little at a time as it's being created, but bring a new person in and require that they understand it all to be successful and you have a real problem.
Get the team to whiteboard the architecture with you. This is better than existing documentation because you will get the full commentary and start building a mental model of the software.
Ask the team about problem areas.
Don't push on major stack/architecture changes until you know the stack/architecture.
Make sure the base engineering practices are there. You should have a seamless workflow from pre-merge code reviews, testing, and deploy.
That brings me to another thing a senior dev can do, refactor code to be more testable, one small piece at a time.
Thing is though, your job as a senior dev is to make sure the code, and the coders, work smoothly together. A good chunk of your work will be mentoring the junior developers, fostering tech exchanges, leading design discussions, etc., and if done right the value in this far outweighs any individual code contribution you can make. In my opinion a true 10x developer is not necessarily one that produces 10x as much code, but one who maybe produces 2x as much, but enables the team around him to produce 5x as much.
Inform management, and make sure it'll be deployed when you fix it - you want to learn the entire process of development and not just the code.
Start learning the architecture, stack and development process with the goal of fixing that single bug. You don't have to learn the entire stack/architecture to fix that single bug. Try not to refactor the entire system while your fixing a bug - the point is to learn how the system works, not to redesign it.
Make notes of the pain points you have - from setting up a dev environment, to lack of documentation or even communication problems.
When you finish, do another bug, perhaps something more challenging.
If you feel that you need to read a book, or do a tutorial on part of the stack you don't know to fix the bug, then do so.
When your done with a few bugs, you are in a position to know and prioritize what quality and changes could be helpful, try and implement them.
If you are fan of pair-programming this may be really good opportunity to introduce this technique to your new team. Since then, we use it whenever we feel it will help.
Both here and in previous roles, I start with the data model and work my way backwards. If you don't understand the data, it's nearly impossible to understand what the system does. In previous roles, I'd also browse through the production environment (e.g., AWS) and look at the monitoring pages for the different components (databases, EC2/ECS instances, queues, etc.) in order to get both a sense of the topology of the production environment and where bottlenecks might exist. In previous roles, I've been able to make some significant improvements early on as a result of that. In my current role, utilization is <5% on almost everything, so that hasn't been helpful.
Earlier in my career, I had a team lead who hired me into a role on a complex system and he scheduled one hour per day with me for a full month to walk through various aspects of the system. Obviously that was a pretty significant time commitment, but I think it paid off for him in that I came up to speed pretty quickly and was quite productive. That always stuck with me and when I became a team lead, I always budgeted a significant amount of my time to bring new members of my team up to speed. I'm pretty frustrated in my current situation as an unproductive senior developer due to unfamiliarity with the functionality of the system and confused as to how its beneficial to the company to operate this way since I am rather well-compensated. I think it's quite penny-wise and pound-foolish for organizations to hire developers and invest as little time as possible in bringing them up to speed.
It's very likely not a considered strategy; rather the total opposite. Technical managers and by extension teams are, generally, really bad at onboarding.
It's nobody's fault per-se, just an unfortunate artefact of giving people responsibility for something they never trained for, usually without any formal plan, and expecting them to just figure it out on instinct.
Of course, most don't. Some do though, really well, and if you find one you've found a gem! It's unfortunately not the norm. Don't frustrate yourself thinking that it is.
Do you know why you were hired? You mentioned "10 devs, QA, BA" .. maybe a good chance to talk to everyone and write down and later agree on a roles & responsibilities matrix. Same goes with process. Talk to everyone and find out what they actually do, write it down and then have an objective discussion if all this is still the best way of doing things / working together.
As for the coding side of things: using cloc [1] and cpd [2] proved to be super helpful every single time for me. When talking to current devs you are likely to get a glimpse if what they worked on recently or will work on in the next few weeks. Cloc gives you the whole story from the beginning. Maybe it's a new stack -- but how come there are 1000s of lines of perl code in the repo? Always a joy to dig deeper and learn about the history. Cpd is a great helper to gauge what your devs actually do vs. what the say. In the heat of deadlines it is often the case that stuff just gets copy and pasted rather than refactored -- which will turn into a nightmare sooner or later. Bonus points for lots of copy/pasting in your test suites and automating cloc & cpd runs ..
Also, if everyone is busy adding code/features, be the one who removes stuff that isn't needed anymore.
On the learning side: you said you are not familiar with the stack. Are you sure your team is? This is a great opportunity to start a learning/ book reading activity for your team.
Last but not least, always assume best intentions. A lot of things probably do not make sense anymore but they did in the past -- find out about the history and you'll earn the trust required to make an impact in the future.
[1] http://cloc.sourceforge.net and https://github.com/AlDanial/cloc [2] http://pmd.sourceforge.net/pmd-4.3.0/cpd.html
I have started having conversations with people on their experience, expectations etc. I am new to the stack but aware of what it is. The team is ramping up and certainly know more about it than me.
The links are very helpful, thanks.
The bugs give me an overview of the system and let me develop my mental map of the code base, the performance problems give me an overview of what's been done wrong.
I ask because if you were hired to come in and right the ship, writing tests might not be perceived by your manager as the right thing to do. If you need to impress the other developers, that might or might not be the right choice.
If you are trying to communicate progress upward, then I would make an honest assessment of the challenges and write down a plan for your manager.
If you are trying to impress downward, then that's probably a cultural challenge and you can figure out what to do from the comments here.
It really depends who cares about your progress.
1. Build on my machine
2. Reproduce issues
3. Fix bugs -- even typos or refactors
4. See the fix code review/merging/deployment to qa/dev/whatever
When I start a new project I'm most concerned with reproducibility of the process of development. A lot of time other people are blind to the little tweaks that have occurred over the years that enable them to build, test, and deploy a system.
Those tweaks often give a lot of insight into what is going on. The ability to push-button deploy is also a bellwether of what is to come.
It will help you to learn the system and technology better than any documentation will. Also it keeps you of the way of the other developers who frankly have better things to do than babysit you (just being honest) but also gives you regular opportunities to chat with everyone as you work through different issues.
Either that or improve monitoring/supportability. Gives you an opportunity to build relationships and earn brownie points with your DevOps/SysAdmins.
* read the docs
* document what is not documented
* write tests
* look at small issues/todos and write code for them
Do not bother your coworkers with endless questions or interruptions, but try to use scheduled times to discuss how you're going to build things. In an ideal company, you shouldn't be building things in a bubble, there should be multiple team members ensuring quality instead of one or two brains. (Also ideally coworkers should be trying to learn how you think so they can best tailor tasks to you)
The hardest part is continual, backbreaking improvement. It becomes easier as you keep doing it. I recommend getting a twitter and following everyone vocal in the area of the tech stack you're working on AND people who work on the same problems as your company (double reinforcement of shared knowledge in your industry). That way you're aware of the current problems that may arise (instead of being left in the dark), trending new ways to do things, counterpoints of why you should avoid some new trends, etc. Scour the internet for resources, such as HN of course, but also popular see sites, subreddits related to the stack, IRC channels, and follow the Github projects of the tech stack if possible (lots of discussion and examples are there!).
I like books. I spend thousands of dollars on books a year, but books on a tech stack rather than development practice will become quickly outdated, and can learn just as much online as you can in a book on a tech stack. I will only buy a tech stack / programming language book is if the language is hard core or if it is new & emerging with a smaller community.
I'd also recommend taking extra time to analyze and plan before diving in. Just sitting for maybe an extra 3 minutes allowing your mind to clear so you can put things together in the right way. Your goal is to become opinionated and knowledgeable faster, so taking the time to get it right early on is permissible.
Finally I recommend something that others won't tell you. It's to become a super fan of the stack (how) and company's mission (why). Your newly found enthusiasm would be a superb speed boost to your goals and add increased visibility to your efforts.
You will not instantly become productive or enlightened, but the fact that you're seeking to be better (yay enthusiasm) does increase the likeliness that you will succeed.
If you see a method which doesn't make sense to you, ask about it. Why is it running the way it is? What corner case prompted it? Is there testing which covers it?
Only once you're sure that the code really is problematic should you refactor it. Otherwise, you're begging for regressions, new bugs, and conflicts with people who wrote the code in the first place.
Understand the impact of codebase you're looking at before you try and change it.
- got a broad overview of the code from my team
- agreed to be the on-call just after two weeks of time; learned a lot because I had to move fast to fix issues (also call people)
- asked the starting point and the core part of the entire codebase (helped me understand code at least 3x faster)
- deployed a feature within 2 weeks of joining
Note: I am not a senior developer, but a software engineer.
I recently witnessed an instance when a senior develoer heavily relied on others for information as you suggest. The team was failing to deliver the manager was incompetent. This senior developer I hired on with was made a scapegoat and blamed for slowing down the team and causing missed deadlines. This was absurd of course, but she got away with it, and he was fired.
Find out what are the black holes (the problems that will pull you in and not let go).
Introduce one improvement to the exsiting processes (automation, documentation e.g. wiki, lunch & learn/brown bag/dev days etc)
1. First thing is to come up with a ramp-up plan. Before you touch any code, before you fix bugs, make sure you have a 30- and 90- day plan for where you need to be and what you need to know. That plan should include with coming up with questions for people and meeting with them to ask them, understanding the company's strategy at a sufficient level, and, yes, understanding the code base and development procedures.
2. As a Senior Developer, it's good to know where the project is now, but people are looking to you to know where the project will be in 6-9 months. So, while fixing bugs is good, don't get bogged down in that - after some initial familiarization, take up tasks that let you focus on big picture architectural and process issues.
3. Take time to get to know your colleagues. Have lunch with them. Have non-work conversations. Start to learn what interests them. Without explicitly asking, pay attention to clues about career goals and what they find challenging. As a senior developer, demonstrating that you are genuinely interested in your colleagues goes a long way towards earning trust and getting embedded into the team faster.
3a. Get a sense of the team's culture. Are there cultural norms you're not used to? Are these norms good/bad/indifferent?
4. Given that you are a Senior Developer, you should make sure your team is hitting a lot of basics. Are there feedback loops, both business-wise and process-wise to your team? If not, you should work on getting these in place (or at least making sure that it happens). Business feedback loops should include some kind of KPI report, adoption report, etc. Process feedback loops usually include regular, honest and constructive retrospectives. Usually if you're hired as a senior developer on a team, most of your teammates will have limited experience in these.
5. Whenever possible, share your perspective. One of the big differences between a senior developer and non-senior developers is that you've seen a few projects, and you've probably seen pitfalls along the way. That's probably a big reason why you were hired. A great way to add value to a team when you still don't know the nitty-gritty is being able to say "It sounds like we're doing X. I was on a team once that did X, and A, B and C happened." Of course, always do it from a point of view of humility - there might be new constraints that you didn't know about.
Beyond that, a lot of it will depend. If you're joining a large company, you should spend some time doing "company networking," i.e. , meeting other senior developers, project managers your team works with, understanding not just your project but other projects near you in the org. If you're joining a start-up, chances are there is a deadline in a few months, so the emphasis will be much more on delivering something immediately. Writing documentation can sometimes be helpful, but if you're at a startup that now has hired its full allotment of engineers, writing a ton of documentation about how to get up to speed is of limited use. Fixing bugs can sometimes be a good approach, but sometimes for teams that didn't have a senior developer before, the proper fix involves a design change. Is there someone else who is also interested in raising the bar for engineering practices, but doesn't know where to begin? Work with that person, since you have the experience as a senior developer, and that person understands the specifics of the team.
I never cared about what stack someone uses.
In some places, the title progression for technical professionals is (dev, senior dev, staff dev, principal dev, arch, senior arch), meaning Senior is actually a junior title.
In other places, the title progression is (dev I, dev II, senior dev, staff dev, senior staff dev, principal), meaning Senior is an intermediate title.
There is of course some variability across companies, but it's safe to say that "Senior Developer" is never an actually senior position. People holding it are never in charge of big things.
As always, you need to ask questions, not make assumptions.
It might be that I read the question wrong. OP says that the tech stack is unfamiliar, and I guess it comes down on whether they've been familiar with a similar tech stack or something is architecturely different.