I’m a junior dev at a small company and they’ve handed me this pure PHP app to take over. It’s got about 1,000 files and is super unorganized with spaghetti code and no comments. It handles stuff like data display, calculations, sending emails, finances, etc.

The database doesn’t have foreign keys, which I learned in school are important to prevent errors, but it’s been working okay for this project so far.

Now, they want me to take over this project. This year, I’ve already worked about 80-100 hours on it. What practices should I apply, so the codebase is more manageable and easy to lean when a new developer takes over.

Any advice on whether I should refactor with Laravel or stick with PHP? How should I go about making this codebase more manageable in the long run?