In my experience, especially with a project with a lot of code written for it already, its good to work through the code and learn it. You'll kinda kill two bir

In my experience, especially with a project with a lot of code written for it already, its good to work through the code and learn it. You'll kinda kill two birds in one stone, learning the language/framework/technology, while catching up on the actual codebase. Bite off a small piece of whats on the TODO list and try to implement it.