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Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#131

Post by hluska »

jdmichal wrote: post #72

I see a lot of advice about individually contributing. I'd recommend another path: Figure out how to be a force multiplier for your team. Sure, maybe you're great at spitting out code and tests. But that's still only one developer of work. If you have 10 people and make them 10% more efficient... That's also one developer of productivity gains. Since you're new, you don't necessarily have all the insight to make this…

> "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!

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#132

Post by xemdetia »

cubano wrote: post #116
Jedi72 wrote: post #4

I am 1 month into my new position, same position you're in - new stack & straight into senior role. My tips so far: 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…

As I have written in previous post, this is where IMO a step-debugger earns its keep. 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 f…

I just wanted to mirror this because often the entry points to various parts of the application is what defines seniority with the particular codebase. The challenges for building how the thing starts and stops as well as the build is something that everyone is currently relying on to do the good work they are doing now. A lot of hard won stability/system issues are solved in that kind of area which dramatically affects what is in the possible vs. something from a wildly different tangent then what's already there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#133

Post by cubano »

mijoharas wrote: post #119
cubano wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have written in previous post, this is where IMO a step-debugger earns its keep. 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 f…

What does IC stand for?

Independent Contractor

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#134

Post by developer2 »

champagnepapi wrote: post #78
bshimmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks…

I am at a 13 person startup. We use Confluence, Bitbucket, Google Apps, and we also use Asana (instead of Jira). It is a nightmare... Information is spread out all over these platforms. We can't stick to only Atlassian tools because the CEO thinks they don't allow you to collaborate... We spend a lot of time looking for where information lives and debating where it should live, complete waste of time. In a smaller co…

>> We use Confluence, Bitbucket... Asana (instead of Jira)

This is the thing with the Atlassian ecosystem. Whether you are pro-Atlassian or anti-Atlassian, there are only two sane options: you either all-in with everything Atlassian, or you are better off with nothing Atlassian. Mixing and matching products when Atlassian is involved is the wrong choice, every time.

The Atlassian suite as a whole is fantastic when the integrations are set up properly. If you dislike Atlassian's licensing or even one of their products, then you should not be using them at all. Don't take on 1-2 of their products, and then replace one of their other core products with an unintegrated competitor. Having a partial Atlassian setup is frustrating as hell to work with.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#135

Post by dntrkv »

cubano wrote: post #116
Jedi72 wrote: post #4

I am 1 month into my new position, same position you're in - new stack & straight into senior role. My tips so far: 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…

As I have written in previous post, this is where IMO a step-debugger earns its keep. 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 f…

I've tried a similar approach in the past and it just does not work for me. Besides the fact that it is very tedious, I don't retain any of the knowledge because it's like reading a dictionary. It's impossible to absorb that much information, for me at least.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#136

Post by dalore »

kabdib wrote: post #71
bshimmin wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of attitude is really unhelpful. Of course this sort of situation is undesirable, demonstrably, but it's not necessarily a case of idiocy - it's actually very easy for non-technical founders to get into this situation: let's say the developers want to use JIRA, but the non-technical staff find JIRA impossible to use (totally reasonable), so they want to carry on using Trello; straight away you've got tasks…

Sorry, an hour a day doing busywork (like entering hours) in a startup is utterly indefensible. I've done a bunch of startups and not only did this never happen, it would not have been tolerated. Even at > I never spent more than about ten minutes a day doing tracking; during heavy bug crunches, maybe an hour doing detailed writeups within bugs for other groups, for communication purposes. In a small team in a compan…

> Time tracking by the hour...

How is that a difficult idea to get around? As a contractor I'm expected to keep track of my hours and what I'm working on. Lucky it's just a chrome extension that I click to start and click to stop. Boom, tracking by hour of what I work on.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#137

Post by [deleted] »

stult wrote: post #90
berdario wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm wondering how widespread claiming "R&D tax credits" actually is. To think that most companies could/would seems preposterous (how many are truly doing something worth of the monicker R&D?) I'm seeing an ecommerce business applying for R&D credit, and that seems absurd, since > Your company can only claim for R&D tax relief if an R&D project seeks to achieve an advance in overall knowledge or capability in a field…

Well I'm in the US, so I can't speak to the UK's regs with much expertise, except insofar as I know most of the world's R&D credits are based on ours. But in the US, most web dev qualifies, including fairly run of the mill ecommerce site. Just judging from what you quote here thought, the US rule is less rigorous. Taxpayers must resolve technological uncertainty just as in the UK, but it's a taxpayer centric test. Me…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#138

Post by maio »

rdsubhas wrote: post #87

Pair program with a few people half a day for a week or two, and you'll become productive both with codebase and with your team mates (as long as you didn't capture their keyboards). Spend rest of the day on everything else mentioned in @Jedi72's comments and get the larger context.

Agreed that pair programming is great to get productive ASAP. That's what I did in my current job. Instead of working on some minor things alone I asked my team-mate to pair with me on a task which was most important/valuable at the time. We spent few weeks working together on various things, and they were quite surprised that I was able to get up to speed so quickly.

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.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#139

Post by nojvek »

cubano wrote: post #116
Jedi72 wrote: post #4

I am 1 month into my new position, same position you're in - new stack & straight into senior role. My tips so far: 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…

As I have written in previous post, this is where IMO a step-debugger earns its keep. 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 f…

Yes debuggers and profilers. I swear by it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?

#140

Post by JimboOmega »

dntrkv wrote: post #135
cubano wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I have written in previous post, this is where IMO a step-debugger earns its keep. 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 f…

I've tried a similar approach in the past and it just does not work for me. Besides the fact that it is very tedious, I don't retain any of the knowledge because it's like reading a dictionary. It's impossible to absorb that much information, for me at least. 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 an…

I recently joined a company as a senior developer with a partially unfamiliar stack, and it's very interesting to me how much my style of learning contrasts with others in that way.

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.

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