Ask HN: What are some of the ways to learn codebases

6 points by hhimanshu 9 years ago | 5 comments

Last time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8263402 article appeared in 2014, I wanted to see if there are methodologies that people have adopted not listed in this article? I would like to hear your experiences. Feel free to contribute here or at https://gist.github.com/hhimanshu/714962f4205d7dddc7e5991a86412805. I would make notes and update the page. Thanks

gjvc 9 years ago |

Learning a codebase requires fast navigation. ctags or a good IDE help with that.

pizza 9 years ago |

"Follow the money!" - but instead of money, follow the data;

- sort source code by filesize

- look at the large methods / code blocks

- browse through the /examples/ and /tests/ dirs to familiarize yourself with typical usage

zzzcpan 9 years ago |

Runtime call tracing is the missing methodology. I haven't found anything better over the years and always implement them if I have to learn things quickly. Made one for nginx even.

hhimanshu 9 years ago | |

thank you. Could you elaborate on this method please?

dsschnau 9 years ago |

Biggest thing for me is to talk to whomever wrote it, or if they're not available, whomever has the most knowledge of the codebase.