Casey asked me:

Any tips on how to read large codebases - especially for more novice programmers?

As it happens, I think that this is a really great question. I think that part of what makes someone a good developer is the ability to go through a codebase and figure out what is going on. In your career you are going to come into an existing project and be expected to pick up what is going on there. Or, even more nefarious, you may have a project dumped in your lap and expected to figure it out all on your own.

The worst scenario for that is when you are brought in to replace “those incontinent* bastards” that failed the project, and you are expected to somehow get things working. But another common scenarios for this include being asked to maintain a codebase written by a person who left the company. And finally, of course, if you are using any Open Source projects, there is a strong likelihood that you’ll be asked to “can you extend this to also do this”, or maybe you are just curious.

Especially for novice programmers, I would strongly recommend that you’ll do just that. See the rest of the post for actual details on how I do that, but do go ahead and read code.

I usually approach new codebases with a blind eye toward documentations / external details. I want to start without preconceptions about how things are working. I try to figure out the structure of the project from the on disk structure. That alone can tell you a lot. I usually try to figure out the architecture from that. Is there a core part of the system? How is it split, etc.

Then I find the lowest level part of the code just start reading it. Usually in blind alphabetical order. Find a file, read it all the way, next file, etc. I try to keep notes (you can see some examples of those in the blog) about how things are hooked together, but mostly, I am trying to get a feel for the code. There is a lot of code that is usually part of the project style, it can be things like precondition checks, logging, error handling, etc. Those things you can learn to recognize early and then can usually just skip them to read the interesting bits.

I usually don’t try to read too deeply at this point, I am trying to get a feeling about the scope of things. This file is responsible for X and do so by calling Y & Z, but it isn’t really important to me to know every little detail at that point. Oh, and I keep notes, a lot of notes. Usually they aren’t really notes but more a list of questions, which I fill / answer as I understand more. After going through the lowest level I can find, I usually try to do a vertical slice. Again, this is most so I can figure out how things are laid out and working. That means that the next time that I am going to go through this, I’ll have a better idea about the structure / architecture of this.

Next, I’ll usually head to the interesting bits. The part of the system that make it interesting to me rather than something that is off the shelve.

That is pretty much it, there isn’t much to it. I am pretty much just going over the code and trying to first find the shape & structure, then I dive into the unique parts and figure out how they are made.

In the meantime, especially if this is hard, I’ll try to go over any documentation exists, if any. At this point, I should have a much better idea about how things are setup that I’ll be able to really go through the docs a lot more quickly.

* I started writing incompetent, but this is funnier.