this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
39 points (95.3% liked)

Programming

17674 readers
57 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Rules

  • Follow the programming.dev instance rules
  • Keep content related to programming in some way
  • If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
snowe
Ategon
[email protected]
39
When you look at some random project's source code for the first time how do you assess time, quality, and complexity at first glance? (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming
11 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I'm just generalizing, like if you want to copy some cleaver feature or modify some Python program you came across, what are the red or green flags indicating how well your (or particularly some hobbyist's/your early learning self's) results are likely to turn out?

Also how can you tell when reading into such a project is going to be a major project that is beyond the scope of you ultimate goals. For instance, I wanted to modify Merlin 3d printer firmware for hardware that was not already present in the project, but as an Arduino copy pasta hobbyist, despite my best efforts, that was simply too much for me to tackle at the time because of the complexity of the code base and my limited skills.

How do you learn to spot these situations before diving down the rabbit hole? Or, to put it another way, what advice would you give yourself at this stage of the learning curve?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)
  • Use cloc to get an idea of line count.
  • See how hard it is to find the entry point
  • Try building it
  • Try hacking a feature into it
  • Try hacking a bigger feature

Thing is, for repos of any typical size, its going to take a lot more than a glance to know.

For example the Atom Editor codebase is immaculate, best formatting/commenting I've ever seen. But getting it to build is a nightmare, so its too hard to contribute to/hack.

Lots of times you just have to dive down the rabbit hole