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Discussion on: How do you get familiar with a new codebase?

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wokejacqueline profile image
jacqueline

Really liked Aaron’s answer.

From a front-end + design perspective, I offer the following advice:

  1. If you have this ability, checkout a few different years worth of files. EG, look at an important page as it was in 2014, 2016, 2018. Oftentimes (and especially where CSS is concerned) methodologies change. If your codebase is anything like mine, they typically change in completely undocumented ways. :) Looking at a view over a few years helps you to understand how CSS is currently approached and how that compares to before.

  2. In the same vein, find a few historic examples of a popular component, like Button or Section and make notes about how these have changed over time. Often design debt is accumulated due to developers not using the “new way” and needlessly overriding old CSS when they could have reached for the correct variable instead. Watch out for this especially if you know the project has gone thru a major redesign.

  3. If you’re new to an established project, search, ask, and bug those around you until you are certain what you’re trying to build doesn’t already exist. Another common way to accumulate technical debt is developer A building a slightly different implementation of something the site already has. If its a common component, like a loader, popover, modal, button, assume the project already has a way to do it... and try to do it that way, unless you absolutely can’t, for a technical reason.

great post ! :)