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The first weeks were mostly reading. Here is how I ramped up on the Jamesway stack and where the tricky parts turned out to be.
The stack
The system was a TypeScript service sitting in front of the incubation hardware, backed by a small datastore. On day one I got a local environment running by cloning the repo and pointing it at a mock version of the machines.
Where things lived
- The collector read state off the machines.
- The view layer turned that state into something operators could read.
- The hardware interface was the part everyone warned me about, because the machines did not always report cleanly.
First contribution
My first merged change was a small fix to how gaps in the readings were handled. It taught me that the hardware was the source of most surprises, not the code. Reviews went through a single senior engineer who knew the machines well.
Code walkthrough
I kept notes as I read through the service, and those notes became the map I used for the rest of the term.