Just joined a new team as a senior dev last fall and went through this. I simply worked my ass off the first couple of months and asked a lot of questions and banged out some very high quality initial commits to make a strong first impression. Have a zen mind/open mind, things will be different and you may not care for some of the approaches taken. Play the long game and gradually make suggestions and changes as you get to know the landscape. My initial feedback from management was very positive, so this approach worked for me.
This was a wonderful book, it really helped lift the veil on how more complicated things were written in code for me. Also, I remember I was at the mall with my uncle and he offered to buy me a gift. I went straight to the bookstore and picked out this book. He was surprised that I picked out a book on programming, and rewarded me with some extra cash after purchasing the book.
My father was diagnosed with lung cancer 4 years ago. He is on his third round of chemo. I recommend reading "The Emperor of all Maladies" for an insightful book on cancer. Even though medicine has made great progress fighting cancer, the scorched earth approach is what most of these treatments come down to.
I keep a journal using Google Docs. Whenever I make an entry, I have the date and a brief summary of any interesting thoughts related to the project, URL links, etc. I always keep a TODO list of what to work on next. This helps immensely when picking up the project again after a while to figure out what I was working on.
I'm currently working my way through this book Artificial Intelligence for Games [1] and am finding it very approachable for someone with no background in AI.
How did you convince management to let you use Clojure? Some of the devs where I am are interested, but I suspect management will be quite hesitant to embrace a new language.