What I've learned about understanding unfamiliar codebases, and why reading code is a skill worth developing
There’s a particular kind of quiet that happens when you first open a new codebase. Thousands of lines written by someone else, with their own conventions, their own history, their own reasons for every decision.
I spend a lot of time in this space. Reading code I didn’t write. Trying to understand not just what it does, but why it was built this way.