I'm a software maintenance engineer. I make my living reading other people's code and trying to internalize it so I can make repairs where they are needed. Th

I'm a software maintenance engineer. I make my living reading other people's code and trying to internalize it so I can make repairs where they are needed. This is an interesting article, and I intend to go listen to the podcast, too. In the past I've made efforts to try to speed up the process of learning a codebase. I'd do things like copy the code into a text processor, then shrink the font so I could see which files (classes) were biggest, and look for repeating shapes like the author mentions. I'd also use code cleaners to point out troublesome classes and UML full-trip tools to try to get a good sequence diagram out of a piece of code. It was all cumbersome, unfortunately. Most days I just use 'grep' to help me figure things out. I'm still looking for helpers, though. I'm hoping the podcast helps.