Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer

The problem with most people's code is that it's full of unnecessary complexity and creates a ton of work. I swear at least 90% of projects from 'top' companies, by 'top' engineers is full of unnecessary complexity which slows everything down significantly. They literally need a team of 20+ engineers to do the work which could have been done more effectively with 1 good engineer.

Based on modern metrics for code quality, almost nobody will realize that they're looking at bad code. I've seen a lot of horrible codebases which looked pretty good superficially; good linting, consistent naming, functional programming, static typing, etc... But architecturally, it's just shockingly bad; it's designed such that you need to refactor the code constantly; there is no clear business layer; business logic traverses all components including all the supposedly generic ones.

With bad code, any business requirement change requires a deep refactoring... And people will be like "so glad we use TypeScript so that I don't accidentally forget to update a reference across 20 different files required as part of this refactoring" - Newsflash: Your tiny business requirement change requires you to update 20+ files because your code sucks! Sure TypeScript helps in this case, but type safety should be the least of your concerns. If code is well architected, complex abstractions don't generally end up stretching across more than one or two files.

There's a reason we say "Leaky abstraction" - If a complex abstraction leaks through many file boundaries; it's an abstraction and it's leaky!

I'm about to start a new role. What have you found most effective in using it to learn a new code base? Just asking questions about "what is this class doing" ? drawing architecture diagrams?

Almost all, yes.

I said 90% in my comment but that's from my professional experience which is probably biased towards complex projects where maintainability is more important.

I fully agree with your sentiment, and it also drives me crazy sometimes.

I wonder if the main problem was all the min maxing interview patterns that rewarded algorithm problem solvers back in the 2010's onwards.

People applied for software engineering jobs because they wanted to play with tech, not because they wanted to solve product problems (which should have a direct correlation with revenue impact)

Then you have the ego boosting blog post era, where everyone wanted to explain how they used Kafka and DDD and functional programming to solve a problem. If you start reading some of those posts, you'll understand that the actual underlying problem was actually not well understood (especially the big picture).

This led the developer down a wild goose chase (willingly), where they end up spending tons of time burning through engineering time, which arguably could be better spent in understanding the domain.

This is not the case for everyone, but the examples are few.

It makes me wonder if the incentives are misaligned, and engineering contributing to revenue ends up not translating to hard cash, promos and bonuses.

In this new AI era, you can see the craftsman style devs going full luddite mode, IMO due to what I've mentioned above. As a craftsman style dev myself. I can only set up the same async job queue pattern that many times. I'm actually enjoying the rubber ducking with the AI more and more. Mostly for digging into the domain and potential approaches for simplification (or even product refinement).