Stack diving: getting up to speed in a large codebase
This article describes a technique that helps to become productive in a large code base quickly. When mentoring other engineers, I found this to be a very effective and teachable approach. The primary audience are software engineers and engineering managers. When I joined larger organisations, the on-boarding usually involved some sort of starter task: add a new metric to the dashboard, allow people to add a website URL to their profile, … . They are a great idea, but often new engineers struggle to make progress – paralysed by the complexity of the code base. Most are start working on a small subset (e.g. do front-end changes first) before understanding the big picture. This not only applies to junior engineers, the same is true for software veterans switching to a new company and auditors parachuting into a short-term project. ...