[sunkencity]

The trick is to be comfortable working with a system that you don't know much about. I personally love figuring out new systems, and starting to work in new unknown environments. Yes it takes a lot of time to figure things out, but when you have done it enough times (figured out 3rd party software), you get a feel for it, and can draw the right conclusions on how a program works fast.

Inexperienced troubleshooters often enter the work with pre-concieved notions of how the system works and hold on to them for too long. Always doubt your knowledge.

I think it usually takes 1-2 days with a system until you start to get our bearings. Before that, you are just collecting data, random tidbits of how the system works.

I second the recommendation to use recommended libraries, and I love github for the code network analysis. Back when I did a lot of java development there was often a java library available which solved the problem available on the internet even for a specialized problem, but more often than not it turned out to be a completely shit implementation that needed to be replaced. Of course there are good java libraries, the trick is to know someone you can trust who can recommend libraries.

OTOH for some rails tasks that can be resolved by just adding a plugin the quality of the code doesn't matter much, since it's just a few lines of code configuration. Still a good library is much better than a bad. I wish there was some kind of leaderboard, or official plugin list for rails, it can be very hard to judge plugins for a newbie.