This is a series leading up to a Virtual Coffee Lunch & Learn titled Asking Coding Questions with Bekah, @bekahhw and me, Nick Taylor, happening May 27th.
How do you navigate a new code base?
This can vary depending on your experience level, but we'd love to hear from all of you.
Tell us all your tips and tricks!
Looking for some inspiration? Check out @adiatiayu’s post!
Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
Top comments (21)
I use codesee.io/ to view the overall structure, as well as drawing some of it out to get it in my muscle memory.
Noice!
Does that support ruby?
I don't think it does yet -- the website says Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, & TypeScript.
In addition to what others have said, go through the existing automated tests. If there's a good testing culture at the company, the tests should show you how the most important flows and functions work and what you can expect as input and output.
Another good thing to consider, see if you can get added to architectural or stakeholder meetings as an observer. Sometimes you can learn a TON about the platform just by seeing it in use or hearing the conversations people are having about it. Even simple things like seeing a single workflow can suddenly flip that switch for you.
Yeah!
For me it would have to be the following;
I’m a huge fan of testing and debugging to learn the codebase.
It also allows you to see how others code, you can pick up so much.
That's awesome! 🔥
I usually prefer someone telling me the entry point for any code base and then take it from there
Get a developer who is familiar with it to onboard you. Then play around with it in a test environment and learn how everything works.
get it up and running, then use debugger to follow one task processing process
Nice!