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

6 points by hhimanshu ↗ HN
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

6 comments

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gjvc
Learning a codebase requires fast navigation. ctags or a good IDE help with that.
pizza
"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
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
thank you. Could you elaborate on this method please?
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dsschnau
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.