Comment by antirez

I think that you can't get as good as you would like to be at reading code: if you are a good code writer, then there aren't so much improvements you can get to your reading skills. Bad code will resist to such skills anyway, because bad code is full of that-bad-code-specific lack of modularity, interfaces, unexpected side effects and dependencies and so forth. You can only get good at reading better "locally", and you can get better at "navigating". But the complexity is in the global architecture and its errors, so you will have to dig, understand what's going on, what code matters, what is dead, how apparently unrelated things actually affect each other. So what I believe is the key, is exactly what somebody replied to the tweet mentioned in this post, that is: learn to write simple code, it is the real point because most of the time you read your own code, fortunately.