Last week I started spending time on the VaultPress team at Automattic. VaultPress was something I hadn’t worked on previously and had only loosely followed, so the code base was something I wasn’t familiar with.
With my relatively fresh eyes (as far as not having worked on VaultPress before) I spent the first day or so just making observational notes about the service. Developers often suffer from having an intimate knowledge of a system, which can make it hard to picture how a regular user (who isn’t familiar with all the ins and outs) views things. This was my chance to avoid that before diving into the code base.
The next day, after assembling my notes, I started diving into VaultPress. Support, bug tickets, documentation, feature requests, code, the whole thing. I picked one of the very minor items from my notes and found the piece of code that needed to be updated. After running a few tests to make sure the change worked as expected, I committed and deployed the new code.
There is something magical about deploying code on a system that just a day or two ago you had never touched before. The joy of watching that first deploy (even for something simple) go live really gets you over that first hurdle of becoming comfortable with a new project.