Real Startup Engineering Lessons From 4+ Years of Experience

How It All Began I joined a startup during my final semester of college full of dreams, excitement, and absolutely zero clue what was coming. They called it an "internship." On Day 1, I walked in expecting some hand holding, maybe a slow ramp-up, a buddy to show me around. Instead, I got a quick KT (knowledge transfer) session and a task: "Create a new API endpoint on the existing codebase." Sounds simple, right? Then I opened the codebase. It wasn't a codebase. It was a monster . Files everywhe