Every task starts with half an hour of grep and following imports down a rabbit hole before I even understand what I'm supposed to change. My onboarding buddy makes it look effortless.
Is this just the tax you pay for the first few months, or should I be doing something smarter than reading files semi-randomly? Genuinely asking, because it's humbling.
Adding to the trace-one-path advice: lean on your tools hard. "Find all references," git blame to see who wrote a thing and why, and search for a literal string from the UI to find where it's rendered. Three weeks in, the codebase feeling like fog is the default — not a you-problem.
Completely normal at three weeks. What helped me: stop trying to understand the whole thing and instead trace one real request end to end — route, down to the DB, and back. You learn the map by walking one path fully instead of skimming everything. Also ask your buddy to narrate how they find things, not just where.
