Experienced Devs

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What's your approach for understanding a big codebase? (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by alexdeathway to c/experienced_devs

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understanding a big codebase you have never worked.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Get it up and running in a dev environment and start inserting changes to see what breaks where.

Revert and retry until you’ve learned where you’re supposed to be meddling.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Another big advantage of getting a dev environment setup is if you can get step by step debugging in place as well. You can then use that to follow the trail of a user action from the UI triggers all the way down.