How a professional programmer approaches debugging a new codebase

In this video, you see a professional programmer encountering someone else's codebase. We need to do some work on this app... but right away, we run into a roadblock. We can't sign up to make an account! What to do? We begin to trace the signup feature through the codebase. We don't just generally "read the code", we focus on investigating just one flow within it, trying to minimize distractions along the way. It can be hard to understand what real work feels like, just from tutorial-level introductions. Hopefully you enjoy this glimpse of a pro-level thought process, within a codebase that's more realistic than a typical tutorial. And hopefully you can see yourself doing this someday too! ------------------- Summary ------------------- VS Code tips: 2:25 Search for text in the whole project (⌘⇧F) 4:30 Jump to where an object is defined (⌘-click) 5:15 Drag to split panes to see code side by side 5:28 Wrap overflowing code so it's all visible (⌥ Z, option-Z) 11:20 Check where the current file is in the file system (⌃-click the file tab) 13:25 Check all references in the project to the clicked object (right-click, choose References in context menu) Strategy: Stay close to the directly-relevant chain of function calls Strategy: Ignore other things 5:58 Ignore irrelevant junk 6:25 Ignore this kinda-strange "call()" function which seems vaguely like a constructor, but isn't. 15:50 Ignore irrelevant junk Strategy: Look directly at dependencies 9:35 Navigate into a class file and understand its purpose via a top-level comment. 10:05 Check an example of how that class is used. 11:20 Determine whether code is third-party or not 12:10 Check a config file to double-check what 3rd-party libraries this project depends on. Strategy: Check app setup starting with the main file 14:05 The main entrypoint file is a good starting point for finding initialization code, in general.