Eating Elephants

or Ramping up on large software projects

As a software engineer, you'll almost certainly ramp up on large projects: anything from massive proprietary software stacks to popular open source projects. This note covers the tricks I've accumulated over the years to onboard quickly^*: mechanical programming tactics, recommendations on quickly building and refining your mental model, and strategies on learning effectively from others. *: To establish my own credentials: over the course of my career, I've switched stacks and domains several times as a professional engineer; from server side reliability to android to jupyter notebooks to ML tools, including deep dives into Pytorch.

To set expectations, a “large” project in this context means one where you cannot realistically expect to read all the code, particularly not in time to deliver anything meaningful with it. I should also warn you that there will be several bad puns along the way to make this post easier to digest.

And just in case you were wondering: no elephants—virtual, or otherwise—were harmed in the making of this post.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.