When working with a project that has already been built up to a certain point, one can find themselves lost in where to look first, how to accomplish their job within that project, how the program even works as a whole. I’ve had firsthand experience with this already working with the Thea’s Pantry system. Ultimately, the only way to really learn what is going on in the system is by looking at the code and trying to make sense of it.
This pattern is very important within the context of working in the Software Development field. The quote at the end is a synopsis of it: if a programmer can learn a codebase quickly after being hired, then they can more quickly be productive and add value to the project for the employer they are writing code for. Otherwise, you’re spending a lot of time just trying to get an understanding of things while you have deadlines coming soon.
The one thing is that obviously getting an understanding of a codebase is incredibly difficult depending on your level of knowledge in various languages and programming as a whole. Of course, this is one of the later patterns (chapter 5), but regardless if I don’t have much experience with JavaScript, trying to read a project that operates on JavaScript at a high level will be a bit more difficult than reading a project that uses C given that I have worked with C for a year, let’s say.
There’s also the consideration of documentation. Documentation can be very helpful, but there will always be cases where the code was changed and the documentation was forgotten about. This leads to additional confusion, and it only compounds when there are comments in the actual code that are misleading, or functions that weren’t written with clean code principles in mind. Everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes lead to tech debt that has been compounded upon to the point where that bit of code that’s hard to understand cannot be changed without a whole refactor.
Of course, this is dependent on the project. I’m sure that projects like version control systems that were mentioned in the reading are fairly consistent because they need to be, and having the experience of learning a codebase like that is definitely useful and builds on adaptation skills that are somewhat of a necessity in the tech field. It’s an interesting thought, and I can see how it can lead to better code.
From the blog CS@Worcester – V's CompSCi Blog by V and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.