Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?
My question is pretty straightforward: how do you, hacker news enthusiast, familiarize yourself with a new codebase? Obviously your answer is going to be contingent on the kind of work that you do. Some background: What's motivating me to ask is that I am flirting with the idea of trying to add a couple of features to SlickGrid (https://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid), Michael Leibman's phenomenal javascript grid widget. Unfortunately Leibman got busy and isn't actively supporting it anymore. The codebase is something like 8k lines of javascript, so it's not ludicrously big, but I'm kind of intimidated thinking about trying to make sense of it. My first strategy is just to open up important-looking javascript files (slick.core.js, slick.grid.js) and read through for comprehension. This seems like a pretty slow way to build a mental model of the
Why it failed
My question is pretty straightforward: how do you, hacker news enthusiast, familiarize yourself with a new codebase? Obviously your answer is going to be contingent on the kind of work that you do. Some background: What's motivating me to ask is that I am flirting with the i
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- roflc0ptic
- Ended
- 2015
- Source
- hackernews