Name: Learning A New Codebase? Here's How To Figure Out What Matters
Uploaded: 2022-04-09
Duration: 3 min 43 s
Description: Learn how to blame the code (i.e

Learning A New Codebase? Here's How To Figure Out What Matters

- Learn how to blame the code (i.e. know who wrote each line of code)
- A lot of people don't realize that when it comes to big companies, there are huge swaths of the codebase where nobody really knows how they work
- When absorbing the codebase on a new team/stack, go through the various classes/files in your ecosystem, and use blame to understand the hotspots, the code that's been changed frequently and recently by people. Don't just try to understand the entire codebase straight up.
  - Use the test plans of connected commits/code reviews to better understand how to run the code and what it does
  - Maintain the system: This is another reason why *you* should have great test plans on your diffs/commits, so you can keep your team's codebase well-documented and easy to learn

Tech has so much to learn, making learning how to learn one of the most important things for any software engineer to do. Figure out what you need to do to pick up new skills quickly and properly.

With how often software engineers change teams, it's crucial to be efficient at this. Learn how to get coding within a new codebase fast, build the proper relationships, and hit the ground running in general.

Code review is one of the most common and powerful ways for software engineers to learn. On top of increasing code quality, it builds engineering culture within a team.

Code review can catch coding mistakes and design flaws before the code reaches production

A good code review process is needed to catch bugs, increase maintainability, and guarantee a high velocity future contributors.