Joining after the previous team had left meant there was no Git repository — just a link to a Google Drive folder.
Inside: folders with no documentation and no architecture notes, containing several WordPress instances, an e-commerce shop, an admin panel, and a separate mobile app. Figuring out which parts were even current took trial and error — copying folders, running Docker locally, comparing against production — including three false starts before finding the right project.
The first real action was establishing a Git repository and a Docker environment for each project, so that every future change would be tracked and reversible.
The scale of the handover: 100+ slides describing the mobile app were converted, via a Python script, into 120+ concrete engineering tasks.
Shipped since then: web app improvements (subscriptions, invoicing, stability) and the Flutter mobile app, released to the Apple App Store.
The takeaway: you can't take real ownership of a system you don't understand.
Content constraint: no real client data, business logic or UI is shown here — only anonymized, conceptual mockups (for example, the existing single-table, two-column database mock used to illustrate dynamic routing).