How to Master a New Company’s Project Landscape in Weeks

When joining a new company, newcomers often struggle to understand the business and project architecture. Instead of trying to master every project in depth, the author proposes a high‑level strategy: get a broad overview of all projects, their purposes, and inter‑relationships so future detailed work is less overwhelming.

1. Necessary Conditions

The two essential pieces of information needed to comprehend any project are:

Source code location (GitLab, SVN, etc.)

Deployment environment (dev / test / online)

Additional helpful resources include wikis, Jenkins configurations, page URLs, and database addresses, but the core is the code repository and environment.

2. From Page to Database Line

After securing the basics, map each project as a linear chain:

Page URL → Front‑end project → Back‑end service → Database address

Many front‑end projects may connect to multiple back‑end services, forming a network. The following diagram illustrates the typical layout:

This exercise clarifies which projects are visible to users, which services they invoke, and what functional capabilities the overall business line provides.

3. Understanding Project Relationships

With the high‑level map, you can later dive into specific projects, but the initial focus remains on the overall structure rather than detailed code.

4. Organizing Database Tables

The next step is to catalogue database tables without getting into field‑level details yet. The process includes:

Identify a core project to start with.

Export all table names; if there are many, filter for core tables.

Exclude non‑essential tables (e.g., those ending with copy, flow, rel, statistics, log, config).

Group remaining tables by business domain (e.g., order tables).

Determine relationships between tables (one‑to‑many, many‑to‑many) by analyzing foreign‑key patterns, possibly with a small helper tool.

After this, you will have a clear picture of the database’s overall structure.

5. Organizing Controller Layer Interfaces

Once the database is understood, shift focus to the API layer. Use a custom tool (or Postman) to list all controller endpoints, showing method names, URL paths, parameters, and return types. Prioritize core endpoints; for many endpoints, start with the most critical ones.

Postman can also store successful and failed examples, generate documentation, and mock services, facilitating front‑end/back‑end collaboration.

6. Re‑clarifying Project Relationships

With knowledge of services, databases, and APIs, revisit the project map to refine inter‑project dependencies:

Detail call relationships based on endpoint names.

Identify middleware usage (e.g., MQ producers and consumers).

Leverage weekly meetings to confirm understanding and discover which projects are core, auxiliary, or stability‑focused.

At this point you can approach specific business code with a solid high‑level context, allowing you to navigate the codebase efficiently and demonstrate a broad architectural perspective, which can lead to greater responsibilities such as architecture or product roles.