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> It's funny. My first step would be > 0. You reach out to the previous maintainers, visit them, buy them tea/beer and chat (eventually) about the code
by lelanthran 3y ago
> It's funny. My first step would be
> 0. You reach out to the previous maintainers, visit them, buy them tea/beer and chat (eventually) about the codebase. Learned Wizards will teach you much.
Have you ever tried that? This is legacy code. Even if the handover was yesterday, they cannot tell you about anything useful they did more than 6m in the past.
And that's the best-case scenario. The common-case is "That's the way I got it when it was handed over to me" answer to every question you ask.
- mst 3y agoI have, and assuming your predecessor doesn't mind, you still get enough useful answers to make it worth it a lot of the time. Especially if you manage to get to just chatting about the project - at some point they'll almost certainly go "oh! while I remember," followed by the answer to a question you didn't realise you should've asked. The value is often in the commiseration rather than the interrogation, basically.