Intro
I started a new job back in June and my first project was taking over and making updates to a big legacy Rails app. Taking the project over was pretty much a worst-case scenario because the project had no tests and nobody who had built the website was still contactable.
Luckily I've been working with Rails for 6 years, and most of the decisions on this project ended up being the Rails standard, so I was able to setup the project, add some tests, and figure out deployments to staging/production.
Along the way I kept notes of my process, and wrote this blog post which gives the 6 steps I take when starting a project like this.
https://nextlinklabs.com/insights/six-tips-for-inheriting-a-legacy-rails-app
I'd love to hear any feedback on the blog post! Also, have any of you had a situation like this where you had to take over an existing project after the original developers have disappeared?
Top comments (3)
I think the post on your website is great!
In the future, I would recommend writing the whole post here on DEV as well. I like to bookmark posts to read them later, and you can add a sentence at the top stating that you originally published your post on your website, for SEO.
I do this on my post, and after a couple weeks, google will rank my website’s post in place of the post on DEV.
Thanks for the recommendation, it's a great idea and I'll definitely do that with my future posts!
Sweet! I really enjoyed that post, and super helpful to see what you do with legacy code like that.