> Reading code, mostly. Tracing data through five layers of someone else's design choices. Forming a hypothesis about why the bug is happening, then testing the hypothesis, then narrowing. Recognising that the function in front of you is too big and asking what part of it has its own reason to exist. Recognising that the schema in front of you encodes a decision someone made in 2019 and that the decision is now load-bearing for things they did not anticipate. Knowing which of the five tempting cleanups in the file is going to bite you in production and which is safe.
It always struck me as strange that universities never had a course that would teach open source code. As in: grab a repo of a popular open source project, read part of it and do your best to create a contribution in it.
The lectures should be about different open source projects and their design choices.
It always struck me as strange that universities never had a course that would teach open source code. As in: grab a repo of a popular open source project, read part of it and do your best to create a contribution in it.
The lectures should be about different open source projects and their design choices.