Untapped Way to Learn a Codebase: Build a Visualizer

Cool project! Would you be willing to share the source code?

In reverse engineering we often use Graph View to see execution flow as well. Glad to see it being used elsewhere

This may be where AI coding tools unlock us. Being able to build tooling against novel concepts that change how we approach reading and writing code. I like it!

This is an interesting approach. I think, in a way, it mirrors what I do. Having contracted for much of my career, I’ve had to get up to speed on a number of codebases quickly. When I have a choice of how to do this, I find a recently closed issue and try to write a unit test for it. If nothing else, you learn where the tests live, assuming they exist, and how much of a safety net you have if you start hacking away at things. Once I know how to add tests and run them (which is a really good way to deal with the codebase setup problem mentioned in the article because a lot of onboarding docs only get you to the codebase running without all the plumbing you need), I feel like I can get by without a full understanding of the code as I can throw in a couple of tests to prove what I want to get to and then hope the tests or CI or hooks prevent me from doing A Bad Thing. Not perfect and it varies depending on on how well the project is built and maintained, but if I can break things easily, people are probably used to things breaking and then I have an avenue to my first meaningful contribution. Making things break less.