Ask HN: What tools do you use to familiarize yourself with a new codebase? Sometimes a codebase has sparse documentation, or the maintainers are too busy to answer questions regularly. This is especially true for open-source projects. When looking over a large codebase with poor documentation, what tools and tricks have you learned to understand it faster/more easily? Examples can be language, platform or IDE-specific, e.g. "projects on github have a handy search in project feature!" |
- Sprinkle logging statements all over the place and tail logs to figure out the execution flow.
- Look at the past merge requests. They typically have descriptions. Go through the ones where you have some context about the goal of MR.
It scans for static methods and data access classes using reflection and dumps their signature/return & parameter information into a documentation template. That way I can see what exits to leverage when adding new features - having spent way too much time over the years listening to 'why didn't you leverage this?' in code reviews.
I'm currently working on a new one that scans for stored procs in databases to see what's living in the dark down there.