Learning a New and Unfamiliar Code Base

Video Description

Learn a few ways to jump into a new code base quickly without feeling intimidated. Hit the subscribe button to receive more videos like this! --- - Build a SAAS app with Flask course: https://buildasaasappwithflask.com - Dive into Docker course: https://diveintodocker.com - Changelog Website: https://changelog.com - Changelog on GitHub: https://github.com/thechangelog/changelog.com - Dev.to Website: https://dev.to - Dev.to on GitHub: https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to --- Timestamps: 0:00 -- What we'll cover in this video 0:39 – In the real world, documentation isn’t always available 1:25 – Exploring 3 different web apps to gain insight on what they do 2:15 – Taking a look at a closed source Flask application 3:55 – Figuring out the tech stack of the application from the bottom up 6:32 – Getting an idea of what a web app does by looking at its URL routes 9:30 – Scoping out a project’s size on the command line in a few seconds 12:15 – Determining how an app is designed based on lines of code for file types 13:11 – Using prior experience and our new found knowledge to find out what to edit 14:05 – Looking at an open source Phoenix app (https://changelog.com) on GitHub 14:50 – One strategy for fixing a bug in an open source project 15:24 – Learning from open source projects to build your own web applications 16:40 – First steps to get familiar with an open source project’s code base 16:45 – Using GitHub’s UI to gain insights on an application’s code base 18:21 – Repeating most of what we did on the command line but on GitHub instead 20:21 – Copying features from an open source project into your project 21:05 – Tracing code on a need to know basis 23:08 – Making your first pull request on an open source project 25:07 – Not every pull request needs to be Earth shattering, small is ok 25:33 – You don’t need to be an expert or professional to contribute to a project 25:52 – Don’t under estimate small pull requests, always test your code! 27:18 – Looking at a Ruby on Rails open source project (https://dev.to) on GitHub 28:04 – Seeing what the dev.to code base is composed of 29:14 – Getting a list of routes, just like we did for the Flask app 29:51 – Exploring the routes at the code level (some web frameworks have this) 31:05 – Repeating what we did previously to find the dev.to tech stack 31:25 – Finding hints of a linting tool being used is a very good sign for code quality 32:02 – Tests are a great way to see how things work under the hood 33:09 – Going back to dev.to’s tech stack 34:33 – Use everything together and your task at hand to determine what to do next 35:35 – Oh yeah! Don’t forget to check a project’s list of package dependencies --- Follow along? Personal Website: https://nickjanetakis.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis