Additionally, the project is on a new tech stack (for me). I would like to be productive as soon as possible and help the team move faster while adding quality and better engineering practices.
Any tips, help, books? Thanks.
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?
#2Fix bugs.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#3"Clean Code" by Robert Martin can certainly help with better engineering practices. Other books that come to mind are "Continuous Integration" by Duvall and Matyas, and "Continuous Delivery" by Humble and Farley.
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#4I 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 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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#5Do you have Team you're overseeing or working with?
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#6My approach is to learn the stack (read books, sketch/prototype).
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.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#7I 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…
Also I'm assuming this is a web app but taking over a live project is a bit like getting handed a gun, you should check if it's loaded before handling it ;) at the least run a vulnerability scanner over your app to look for security issues
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#8I 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…
>> 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.
I'm skeptical that management would need a daily status.
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#9Start fixing long standing bugs nobody wants to address because too complex
Re: Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as a senior developer?
#10Well, first of all, talk to the team. To every single person involved. Be it the CTO or the intern. Have someone who has been on the team for some time onboard you and find out what the current obstacles are.
Then just grab one task and start working. You'll find the place you're needed most automatically.