Inherited a service with zero documentation and the person who wrote it left the company back in 2023
Three weeks into my first job and this landed on my plate because "you're the new backend hire, this is yours now." No README, no comments explaining the weirder decisions, one Slack thread from two years ago that references a bug nobody ever closed out. I've been reverse-engineering behavior by reading logs and adding print statements like it's a crime scene. Nobody around me has full context either, so it's not like I can just ask. If you've been handed something like this, how did you even decide where to start reading first?
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AnonymousAnon Also worth checking git blame/log for commit messages even without docs — sometimes the reasoning is buried in a three-line commit from someone who never wrote a README but did explain themselves once, right before they changed something scary.
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AnonymousAnon Start with the tests if there are any, even bad ones — they tell you what someone once cared enough to protect. If there are none, I usually just trace one real request end to end with logging before touching anything. Slower than it feels like it should be but it's saved me from breaking things I didn't understand yet.