Tuan Mark

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Posted in New Position Senior engineer, where to start?

Hey, congrats on the new role! I was in a similar spot recently.

If you’ve got a month, I’d focus less on basics and more on how Rails apps are structured in real life:

  1. Deepen core Rails concepts

MVC is obvious, but really understand:
ActiveRecord (associations, scopes, callbacks)
background jobs (Sidekiq/ActiveJob)
service objects / POROs (since most real apps use them)

  1. Read real code

Clone a solid open-source Rails app (like Discourse or similar)
Follow a request from controller → model → view → background job
This helped me more than tutorials

  1. Testing

Get comfortable with RSpec + factories
Learn how people structure tests (request specs, model specs)

  1. Common patterns in production apps

Service objects
Form objects
Authorization (Pundit/CanCanCan)
API design (if they use Rails as backend)

  1. Do a small project

Build something simple but “production-like”:
auth
background job
API endpoint
tests

  1. Bonus (huge plus as senior)

Read about performance (N+1 queries, indexing)
Caching basics
Code review best practices

Honestly, the biggest shift at “senior” level is not syntax, it’s reading code, making decisions, and understanding trade-offs.