Saw the name Markus Golden pop up somewhere the other day. Made me think, you know? This guy has been around, played for a few different teams. Cardinals, Giants, then back again. Always seems to find a way to get after the quarterback, doesn’t matter the uniform.
It got me remembering this situation I went through a while back. Not football, obviously, but that same kind of feeling – having to jump into something new and just figure it out.
Switching Gears Unexpectedly
I was working on this internal tool project. We’d been plugging away at it for months, trying to build this new system for managing some company assets. Felt like we were making decent progress, finally getting some core features locked down. Then, out of the blue, management came in one Monday morning.
They basically said, “Stop everything.” Priorities shifted, they told us. The whole project I’d been focused on? Shelved. Just like that. And me? I was being reassigned immediately to help out another team working on a completely different system, something customer-facing this time. I barely knew what that team did, let alone the tech they were using.
Talk about a shock. One day you’re deep in one thing, the next you’re starting from scratch somewhere else.
My Process: Just Digging In
So, what do you do? I showed up at the new team’s area. Felt like the new kid in school.
- First step: Just tried to listen. Sat in their meetings, trying to pick up the lingo, figure out what their main problems were.
- Next: Got access to their code repository. Man, it was… something else. Different style, different structure than what I was used to.
- Then came the setup: Trying to get their development environment running on my machine. That was a nightmare. Took me like, two solid days of fiddling with config files and asking dumb questions. Felt pretty useless.
- Started small: The team lead gave me a few tiny bug tickets. Stuff like fixing typos on a webpage or adjusting some layout issue. Simple stuff, but it forced me to navigate the codebase, figure out where things were.
- Kept asking questions: Probably drove them nuts, but I had to understand how their stuff worked. Why was this built that way? Where does this data come from?
- Gradual progress: After fixing a bunch of small things, I started to see the patterns. Began to understand the flow. Eventually, I could take on slightly bigger tasks. Refactoring a messy piece of code here, adding a small feature there.
It wasn’t glamorous. It was just showing up each day, chipping away at it. Trying to be useful, even when I felt totally out of my depth. A bit like Golden just focusing on his rush lanes, I guess. You just focus on the task right in front of you, ignore the noise, and push forward.
Eventually, I got comfortable. Found my rhythm within that team. It wasn’t the project I started or even the one I would have chosen, but I made it work. You just adapt, right? Sometimes you land in a new spot, and you just gotta figure out how to contribute. Put your head down and grind.
