Joining a new programming team to work on an existing product is a situation programmers often find themselves in. In such a situation, becoming productive and delivering business value quickly is a formidable task due to lack of adequate domain knowledge to begin with, exposure to a new code base, getting tuned to a possibly new framework and perhaps to a new programming methodology. Some of the top priorities of a new team member are getting the necessary domain understanding, getting a grasp of the architecture and the reasoning behind the applied methodologies. As vital as all of this is, it cannot be reverse engineered solely by reading the code or the documentation. Based on my experiences I would like to present some of the techniques that can help a new recruit to quickly arrive at a stage where they can make a meaningful contribution towards the evolution of the software.