Watch part one of our new video series about working with legacy code, and projects you're not familiar with.
Welcome to our video series!
There are a lot of videos online of software engineers building things from scratch, and a lot of videos of engineers solving challenges or working with code that they're familiar with.
These are both incredibly useful but sometimes it can look a bit like magic. How do they know exactly where they will be adding code? In real life, software engineers often work with code we've never seen before that someone else wrote which means we need to go through a process of understanding the current codebase (legacy code) and working out where we need to make the changes before adding the code that achieves this.
In this video series, we'll be putting experienced software engineers in front of open source projects that they've never seen before and asking them to add a feature. We don't care about the code, we're more interested in how they approach the problem and the steps they go through to solve it.
In this episode:
- James will be our experienced engineer. James is an engineering lead and has worked with Rails and React at Simply Business and previous companies.
- We'll be using an open sourced clone of the blog 'Medium' called Stories.
Key takeaways from the episode
- Before even thinking about design, James wanted to dive into the codebase and find the code that created the preview form (that we wanted to add the button to) and also the publish button so that his design decisions would be based off how the code currently works, rather than speculating.
- To find the code, he started with the front-end and used the
inspect elementfeature in the browser to identify elements on the form & button (e.g. finding theidof an element) which he then used to search the codebase and find the corresponding code. - A tactic he used quite often was to just think of places he thought the code would make sense to be (
header,navigation,menu) and search for those files. This resulted in some quick wins.
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to join us for the next one!
Ready to start your career at Simply Business?
Want to know more about what it's like to work in tech at Simply Business? Read about our approach to tech, then check out our current vacancies.
Find out moreWe create this content for general information purposes and it should not be taken as advice. Always take professional advice. Read our full disclaimer
Keep up to date with Simply Business. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and follow us on social media.
Subscribe to our newsletterInsurance
Public liability insuranceBusiness insuranceProfessional indemnity insuranceEmployers’ liability insuranceLandlord insuranceTradesman insuranceSelf-employed insuranceRestaurant insuranceVan insuranceInsurersAbout
About usOur teamAwardsPress releasesPartners & affiliatesOur charitable workModern Slavery ActSection 172 statementSocial mediaSite mapAddress
6th Floor99 Gresham StreetLondonEC2V 7NG
Northampton 900900 Pavilion DriveNorthamptonNN4 7RG
© Copyright 2024 Simply Business. All Rights Reserved. Simply Business is a trading name of Xbridge Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Financial Services Registration No: 313348). Xbridge Limited (No: 3967717) has its registered office at 6th Floor, 99 Gresham Street, London, EC2V 7NG.