Starting over in a new codebase

A new role resets your context, not your skills. The first weeks are for listening to the code.

Changing jobs has a strange effect. You walk in with years of experience and still spend the first week asking where things are.

That used to feel like going backwards. Now I think it’s the most useful part.

A new codebase is full of decisions someone made for a reason. Some reasons are still true, some aren’t, and from the outside you can’t tell which is which. So the first job isn’t to improve anything. It’s to understand why it looks the way it does.

A few things I try to do early: run the app end to end before reading too much code. Trace one real request from the UI to the database and back. Read recent pull requests to learn how the team actually works. Write down every question, even the ones that feel obvious.

The skills come with you. The context has to be rebuilt. Being patient with that second part is what makes the first part useful again.