Things I wish someone told me before my first internship
Nobody expects you to know the codebase. They expect you to ask good questions.
There is a version of this article that opens with theory. I decided against it, because the theory is easy to find and the motivation is not — so let's start with the thing that actually broke.
Where I started
The numbers below are from my own machine and my own workload. Treat them as a method, not a benchmark: the point is how the measurement was taken, not the exact figures it produced.
The first version worked, which is exactly why it was hard to see how wrong it was. Everything looked fine in the demo, and everything looked fine until traffic arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and the graph started doing something I'd never seen before.
- Read the error message twice before changing anything
- A second point, kept short on purpose
What went wrong
The first version worked, which is exactly why it was hard to see how wrong it was. Everything looked fine in the demo, and everything looked fine until traffic arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and the graph started doing something I'd never seen before.
By the end of this post you should be able to reproduce the whole thing yourself in under an hour, including the parts I got wrong the first time — those are marked so you can skip them if you're in a hurry.
Everything above is the short version. The full write-up of how this played out is a story for another day — for now, the takeaway is simple: nobody expects you to know the codebase. they expect you to ask good questions is a decision you make once and revisit deliberately.