8 ms·

Become a Better Developer by Reading Source Code

193 points by 0x54MUR41 7y ago

thrower123 7y ago
Yes, it is great to read source code. One of the great things about most things being on GitHub these days. Also great when you can use decompilers (Java and .NET especially) to determine exactly how the library code you use works. One of my favorite exercises though is to port code from one language to another. Reading the code gets you to one level of understanding. Implementing it yourself while following along gets you to another level. But translating it really gets you a level of mastery of what the code is doing.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “Also great when you can use decompilers (Java and .NET especially) to determine exactly how the library code you use works.” Decompiling .NET and earlier reading leaked windows source code have given me the revelation that the people working on these systems are regular people like you and me. Somehow I thought MS or Apple code was something special but it really wasn’t. But I agree: reading source code is good for learning and also empathy. It’s way too easy to look at a code base for five minutes and declare this needs to be totally rewritten because the previous devs wrote bad code
hinkley 7y ago
A big part of me wants Comparative Coding classes to be taught to college students. Even though I have a pretty sad cautionary tale about Comp Lit classes from a very good friend who went for an English degree. Some of the earliest conversations I recall were about the trap of taking Comp Lit too seriously and not spending enough time on the craft. Eventually your inner critic creates fear that your work isn't good enough, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. I spent the next decade watching helplessly as the inner critic ate my friend's hopes and dreams one by one. In her head, she was going to be a great fiction writer. But the only thing of hers I ever remembered was her persuasive writing. She was passionate about her causes, but somehow also had it in her head that this wasn't 'real writing', and I didn't have the gravitas to convince her she was wrong. And so the sad fact is that if you look at what I've written and shown to people, and what she's written and shown to people, it would be charitable to say she's done three times as much as I have, to an audience perhaps ten times as large. Me, who only briefly wanted to be a writer in grade school, whose only college-level English class was a technical writing class. I am not a Writer, but I write. She is a Writer, and doesn't. But even so, I've got body parts stuck in this same trap. I write a lot less code that some other people. But I also work hard to make sure that I'm on the right side of the Pareto principle. It's not the lines that count but how you use them, or so I reason. But I've started noticing the consequence of that choice, and trying to find a new balance between quantity and quality. Old habits die hard.
- Swizec 7y ago
  Writers write. Coders code. To quote a famous parable of the pottery class The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. The best way to get better at creative pursuits is to create. Then get feedback. As much feedback as you can find.
  - odyssey7 7y ago
    "The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it." - The C Programming Language, K&R
    - detaro 7y ago
      But "become a better developer" is not just "learn a new programming language"
      - suifbwish 7y ago
        It depends. Being able to stitch multiple languages together definitely has its “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” aspects to it. Better programming for me is creating or discovering a tool that is useful to me that makes some part of my path to programming better. Building your own version of a language can be a fun way to get better at coding too. Grab the base source of any language and find all the string values and start do a mass search and replace to new ones that don’t exist yet in the language. The problems you will run into will bring you to examine parts of the language you weren’t aware of.
swiley 7y ago
Everyone should try and read busybox. It’s a fairly complete implementation of a normal “unix” user space without the libc. Most commands are completely contained in files less than a few thousand lines long and can be read through and completely understood in an afternoon. I personally use it for most things because of that even if some utilities are a little incomplete, being able to double check the source easily makes me feel like I won’t get surprised.
- thepete2 7y ago
  Why not the GNU or BSD coreutils?
  - dastx 7y ago
    Presuming because they are significantly bigger compared to busybox due to the limited feature set of busybox
- dana321 7y ago
  Had a quick look, found this little gem, a math evaluator with precedence. https://github.com/mirror/busybox/blob/master/shell/math.c https://github.com/mirror/busybox/blob/master/shell/math.c Some funny comments like "Think about it. * It makes sense."
  - voldacar 7y ago
    > The lower 5 bits are the precedence, and 3 high bits are an ID unique across operators of that precedence. This is so cool. Nobody would write code like this today
    - tachyonbeam 7y ago
      People wouldn't optimize a shell like that anymore, but people still do encode small pieces of information into integers using bitwise operations when compactness is an advantage. If you're dealing with a large data structure with tens of millions (or billions) of entries, compact encoding still trumps convenience, because memory bandwidth will often be the bottleneck. A data structure that would benefit from a compact encoding could be a compiler's intermediate representation, for example.
thepete2 7y ago
I want to read some good C code. Can anyone recommend me a project that's not too big? I'm thinking of skimming some of these core linux libraries [0] [0] http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter03/packages.html http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter0...
- lcall 7y ago
  Late to this, & am not really a C programmer (longtime bash & java/scala etc, and studying Rust now), but for exemplary C I think of OpenBSD core utilities first (ie, not ports & packages), given their ongoing auditing for security and correctness. The code can be browsed online, or installed as part of a basic system. I found it interesting to browse starting with some smaller utilities like echo and ls. Resources: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/bin/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/bin/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ https://github.com/openbsd https://github.com/openbsd https://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html https://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html https://www.openbsd.org/ https://www.openbsd.org/ (where I got the above links, on the left side under "Getting Source")
  - lcall 7y ago
    (just to improve my previous accuracy where I mentioned scala & rust, though it's too late to edit: ...and C++ and many other things .)
- dana321 7y ago
  lmdb is one that comes off the top of my head. But even that the main file is 11000+ lines of code.
- rgrau 7y ago
  redis is very good. Also, any suckless project is very readable. I liked Lua code too. I'm not a C programmer but these projects have this Quality in common that transcends the programming language (I think). Opinions?
- porknubbins 7y ago
  If you’re going to try read along with Robert Love’s Linux Kernel Development. Even outdated its the best guide I’ve found. That said I’m kind of a C beginner so take with a grain of salt. I frequently get derailed by the Macros, architectural stuff etc in the kernel and can’t figure out what exactly the code is doing.
webdva 7y ago
I synthesized a very small amount of programming ability and skill from reading randomly chosen and scattered source files of an open source Quake clone’s source code (Digital Paintball 2), even though its comprehension and understanding it was beyond my capabilities at the time, especially at such a young and immature age. That tiny amount was negligible, but it still functions today as a segment of my present and current programming knowledge infrastructure. So you can safely conclude that the activity of reading “seemingly” insignificant programming source code files is a future knowledge, capability, and understanding’s becoming-vital infrastructure. For what power does not have a base or foundation to plant its feet upon?
renox 7y ago
I already have to read source code by doing my team's reviews, and I don't enjoy it. Maybe it's because of the responsibility (why didn't you caught this bug in the review?), but it's really difficult.
- pbalau 7y ago
  Then maybe you are not meant for this? Yes, I do find it really hard to read code I have no interest in, but it was proven that if I understand the underlying idea, I can both read and find issues with the code I'm reading. The first rule is to care and understand what the code is trying to do.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I have found that the secret (for me) is to manufacture some reason to read the code. Code is difficult to read from top to bottom unless it's done in a literate style. Instead, it is much more pleasurable if you are jumping around reading code because you want to understand something. I find that editing the code makes a big difference. Find something to chage. Refactor something. Add a tiny (even meaningless) feature. This forces you to understand what the code is doing. That, in turn, forces you to explore the code and to read it. It also gives you a gauge to judge the code against. Why did they do it that way? What if I changed it? Oh, I see why the couldn't do it like that. Yes, their solution is quite nice. That kind of thing. I very frequently refactor PRs at work and show my refactoring to nobody. Usually it's 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other. However, it gives me an idea about how flexible the code is. Or I might start to implement the next feature that's likely to touch that code. Not TDD. Just sketching some code and seeing how easy it is. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it.
jbn 7y ago
This is essentially what https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529511.Code_Reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529511.Code_Reading and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169414.Code_Quality https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169414.Code_Quality are all about... And about the "what if i don't understand it" bit, i would suggest one goes and reads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903771 ;-)
- mxschumacher 7y ago
  the reviews for those two books are really bad - do you recommend them?
julius_set 7y ago
1 Some people here are mentioning code reviews for their teams and how they don’t enjoy that. I would say this article is missing a fair point. I’ve learned a lot by just browsing Github. For example if I’m interested in solving a Caching problem I’ll skip some of the open source libraries around caching and how it’s implemented. Often times you run into a very elegant and readable solution that someone has created. And the most interesting takeaway from that is that you can get inside the persons head around API design and implementation. When I stumble upon an awesome elegant library I always either take a mental note about it or try a small sample implementation of my own. This has helped me synthesize great APIs designs over my career. You develop your own style over time by picking and choosing your elegant solutions, and eventually you also come up with your own bright ideas through language features or loopholes that come across as exceptionally elegant.
jackkinsella 7y ago
As with any good habit, it's important to reduce resistance. If you want to eat healthy, have juicy apples at hand in the fridge. I made a conscious decision to start installing all my dependencies into a folder within my project source-code so that I can painlessly jump to the dependency's source and read it. (E.g. in the Ruby world, this means installing to "./vendor" in your project). The effect of doing this is that it's easier for me to read the source code of a library than it is for me to leave Vim and look up the docs online. Voilà, now I'm reading more source.
- jedieaston 7y ago
  I write Python mostly, and whenever I want to quickly look at what a library is doing, I just right click and do Go To Definition (what it's called in VSCode, I believe it's something similar in IntelliJ/PyCharm) and it'll jump through the library folders in my virtualenv to get to wherever the function/class is. Then I don't have to think about dependencies as much, albeit in Python there's always a struggle with that :P
otterpro 7y ago
I remember going through the original Doom source code after it was released as open source. Although it seemed way over my head, I learned a lot about how well C code can be made to work, even for a complex game (at least at that time). I also got to appreciate John Carmack's coding style/skill even more.
cuddlecake 7y ago
With the Elixir language, I find myself looking at the source code of my dependencies more often, since I can actually read and understand what's going on most of the time, despite barely coding in Elixir. When I do, I can look for inspiration in other people's code. I rarely feel this way with Kotlin or Java libs, and I'm only slowly warming up to TypeScript code.
irrational 7y ago
Decades ago I became a much much better web developer by reading the source code of web pages. Unfortunately that is rarely possible to do anymore. I really feel the web is the worse for it.
- diroussel 7y ago
  I find it surprising how often you can see a web page you like, and then go and find the repo on GitHub that built it. Definitely for open source organisations, but also often for consultancies and government agencies.
kureikain 7y ago
I run a newsletter[0] that has a section call "Code to read" for many language. I tried to include small/interesting repos to do weird/cool things so people can learn about it. Eg, this code: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch (UI in Python but the logic is Go) --- [0]: https://betterdev.link https://betterdev.link
JDiculous 7y ago
Seeing well architected code bases is how I went from total noob to "professional". You can't know what's good code if you've never seen good code before. There really should be a list of "good" codebases for people to look at and study. If anyone has any good backend Node.js codebase recommendations, I'd love to take a look.
- pinkfoot 7y ago
  Read the git source code.
- Kaze404 7y ago
  It's not exactly what you're asking for, but recently I started using Nest.js and it's been a godsend. It's a very opinionated framework, which means you can skip all the bootstrapping and go straight to building the actual application.
SeriousM 7y ago
Stating the obvious. Reading source code, no matter what quality it is will make you a better engineer. Reading software architecture focused material (books, blogs...) will make you a better architect.
- aryamaan 7y ago
  Some suggestions for the resources in the architecture domain? Actually, I wouldn't mind a comprehensive guide about it. It needs not to go in the details in all of them but at least should name them.
naveen99 7y ago
Read the source of the libraries you use and the functions you want to modify or fork.

193 points by 0x54MUR41 7y ago

Yes, it is great to read source code. One of the great things about most things being on GitHub these days. Also great when you can use decompilers (Java and .NET especially) to determine exactly how the library code you use works. One of my favorite exercises though is to port code from one language to another. Reading the code gets you to one level of understanding. Implementing it yourself while following along gets you to another level. But translating it really gets you a level of mastery of what the code is doing.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
“Also great when you can use decompilers (Java and .NET especially) to determine exactly how the library code you use works.” Decompiling .NET and earlier reading leaked windows source code have given me the revelation that the people working on these systems are regular people like you and me. Somehow I thought MS or Apple code was something special but it really wasn’t. But I agree: reading source code is good for learning and also empathy. It’s way too easy to look at a code base for five minutes and declare this needs to be totally rewritten because the previous devs wrote bad code

hinkley 7y ago

A big part of me wants Comparative Coding classes to be taught to college students. Even though I have a pretty sad cautionary tale about Comp Lit classes from a very good friend who went for an English degree. Some of the earliest conversations I recall were about the trap of taking Comp Lit too seriously and not spending enough time on the craft. Eventually your inner critic creates fear that your work isn't good enough, and it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. I spent the next decade watching helplessly as the inner critic ate my friend's hopes and dreams one by one. In her head, she was going to be a great fiction writer. But the only thing of hers I ever remembered was her persuasive writing. She was passionate about her causes, but somehow also had it in her head that this wasn't 'real writing', and I didn't have the gravitas to convince her she was wrong. And so the sad fact is that if you look at what I've written and shown to people, and what she's written and shown to people, it would be charitable to say she's done three times as much as I have, to an audience perhaps ten times as large. Me, who only briefly wanted to be a writer in grade school, whose only college-level English class was a technical writing class. I am not a Writer, but I write. She is a Writer, and doesn't. But even so, I've got body parts stuck in this same trap. I write a lot less code that some other people. But I also work hard to make sure that I'm on the right side of the Pareto principle. It's not the lines that count but how you use them, or so I reason. But I've started noticing the consequence of that choice, and trying to find a new balance between quantity and quality. Old habits die hard.

Swizec 7y ago
Writers write. Coders code. To quote a famous parable of the pottery class The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pounds of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. The best way to get better at creative pursuits is to create. Then get feedback. As much feedback as you can find.
- odyssey7 7y ago
  "The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it." - The C Programming Language, K&R
  - detaro 7y ago
    But "become a better developer" is not just "learn a new programming language"
    - suifbwish 7y ago
      It depends. Being able to stitch multiple languages together definitely has its “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” aspects to it. Better programming for me is creating or discovering a tool that is useful to me that makes some part of my path to programming better. Building your own version of a language can be a fun way to get better at coding too. Grab the base source of any language and find all the string values and start do a mass search and replace to new ones that don’t exist yet in the language. The problems you will run into will bring you to examine parts of the language you weren’t aware of.

swiley 7y ago

Everyone should try and read busybox. It’s a fairly complete implementation of a normal “unix” user space without the libc. Most commands are completely contained in files less than a few thousand lines long and can be read through and completely understood in an afternoon. I personally use it for most things because of that even if some utilities are a little incomplete, being able to double check the source easily makes me feel like I won’t get surprised.

thepete2 7y ago
Why not the GNU or BSD coreutils?
- dastx 7y ago
  Presuming because they are significantly bigger compared to busybox due to the limited feature set of busybox
dana321 7y ago
Had a quick look, found this little gem, a math evaluator with precedence. https://github.com/mirror/busybox/blob/master/shell/math.c https://github.com/mirror/busybox/blob/master/shell/math.c Some funny comments like "Think about it. * It makes sense."
- voldacar 7y ago
  > The lower 5 bits are the precedence, and 3 high bits are an ID unique across operators of that precedence. This is so cool. Nobody would write code like this today
  - tachyonbeam 7y ago
    People wouldn't optimize a shell like that anymore, but people still do encode small pieces of information into integers using bitwise operations when compactness is an advantage. If you're dealing with a large data structure with tens of millions (or billions) of entries, compact encoding still trumps convenience, because memory bandwidth will often be the bottleneck. A data structure that would benefit from a compact encoding could be a compiler's intermediate representation, for example.

thepete2 7y ago

I want to read some good C code. Can anyone recommend me a project that's not too big? I'm thinking of skimming some of these core linux libraries [0] [0] http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter03/packages.html http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable-systemd/chapter0...

lcall 7y ago
Late to this, & am not really a C programmer (longtime bash & java/scala etc, and studying Rust now), but for exemplary C I think of OpenBSD core utilities first (ie, not ports & packages), given their ongoing auditing for security and correctness. The code can be browsed online, or installed as part of a basic system. I found it interesting to browse starting with some smaller utilities like echo and ls. Resources: https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/bin/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/bin/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/ https://github.com/openbsd https://github.com/openbsd https://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html https://www.openbsd.org/anoncvs.html https://www.openbsd.org/ https://www.openbsd.org/ (where I got the above links, on the left side under "Getting Source")
- lcall 7y ago
  (just to improve my previous accuracy where I mentioned scala & rust, though it's too late to edit: ...and C++ and many other things .)
dana321 7y ago
lmdb is one that comes off the top of my head. But even that the main file is 11000+ lines of code.
rgrau 7y ago
redis is very good. Also, any suckless project is very readable. I liked Lua code too. I'm not a C programmer but these projects have this Quality in common that transcends the programming language (I think). Opinions?
porknubbins 7y ago
If you’re going to try read along with Robert Love’s Linux Kernel Development. Even outdated its the best guide I’ve found. That said I’m kind of a C beginner so take with a grain of salt. I frequently get derailed by the Macros, architectural stuff etc in the kernel and can’t figure out what exactly the code is doing.

webdva 7y ago

I synthesized a very small amount of programming ability and skill from reading randomly chosen and scattered source files of an open source Quake clone’s source code (Digital Paintball 2), even though its comprehension and understanding it was beyond my capabilities at the time, especially at such a young and immature age. That tiny amount was negligible, but it still functions today as a segment of my present and current programming knowledge infrastructure. So you can safely conclude that the activity of reading “seemingly” insignificant programming source code files is a future knowledge, capability, and understanding’s becoming-vital infrastructure. For what power does not have a base or foundation to plant its feet upon?

renox 7y ago

I already have to read source code by doing my team's reviews, and I don't enjoy it. Maybe it's because of the responsibility (why didn't you caught this bug in the review?), but it's really difficult.

pbalau 7y ago
Then maybe you are not meant for this? Yes, I do find it really hard to read code I have no interest in, but it was proven that if I understand the underlying idea, I can both read and find issues with the code I'm reading. The first rule is to care and understand what the code is trying to do.
mikekchar 7y ago
I have found that the secret (for me) is to manufacture some reason to read the code. Code is difficult to read from top to bottom unless it's done in a literate style. Instead, it is much more pleasurable if you are jumping around reading code because you want to understand something. I find that editing the code makes a big difference. Find something to chage. Refactor something. Add a tiny (even meaningless) feature. This forces you to understand what the code is doing. That, in turn, forces you to explore the code and to read it. It also gives you a gauge to judge the code against. Why did they do it that way? What if I changed it? Oh, I see why the couldn't do it like that. Yes, their solution is quite nice. That kind of thing. I very frequently refactor PRs at work and show my refactoring to nobody. Usually it's 6 of 1 half a dozen of the other. However, it gives me an idea about how flexible the code is. Or I might start to implement the next feature that's likely to touch that code. Not TDD. Just sketching some code and seeing how easy it is. If you've never tried it, I highly recommend it.

jbn 7y ago

This is essentially what https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529511.Code_Reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/529511.Code_Reading and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169414.Code_Quality https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/169414.Code_Quality are all about... And about the "what if i don't understand it" bit, i would suggest one goes and reads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903771 ;-)

mxschumacher 7y ago
the reviews for those two books are really bad - do you recommend them?

julius_set 7y ago

1 Some people here are mentioning code reviews for their teams and how they don’t enjoy that. I would say this article is missing a fair point. I’ve learned a lot by just browsing Github. For example if I’m interested in solving a Caching problem I’ll skip some of the open source libraries around caching and how it’s implemented. Often times you run into a very elegant and readable solution that someone has created. And the most interesting takeaway from that is that you can get inside the persons head around API design and implementation. When I stumble upon an awesome elegant library I always either take a mental note about it or try a small sample implementation of my own. This has helped me synthesize great APIs designs over my career. You develop your own style over time by picking and choosing your elegant solutions, and eventually you also come up with your own bright ideas through language features or loopholes that come across as exceptionally elegant.

jackkinsella 7y ago

As with any good habit, it's important to reduce resistance. If you want to eat healthy, have juicy apples at hand in the fridge. I made a conscious decision to start installing all my dependencies into a folder within my project source-code so that I can painlessly jump to the dependency's source and read it. (E.g. in the Ruby world, this means installing to "./vendor" in your project). The effect of doing this is that it's easier for me to read the source code of a library than it is for me to leave Vim and look up the docs online. Voilà, now I'm reading more source.

jedieaston 7y ago
I write Python mostly, and whenever I want to quickly look at what a library is doing, I just right click and do Go To Definition (what it's called in VSCode, I believe it's something similar in IntelliJ/PyCharm) and it'll jump through the library folders in my virtualenv to get to wherever the function/class is. Then I don't have to think about dependencies as much, albeit in Python there's always a struggle with that :P

otterpro 7y ago

I remember going through the original Doom source code after it was released as open source. Although it seemed way over my head, I learned a lot about how well C code can be made to work, even for a complex game (at least at that time). I also got to appreciate John Carmack's coding style/skill even more.

cuddlecake 7y ago

With the Elixir language, I find myself looking at the source code of my dependencies more often, since I can actually read and understand what's going on most of the time, despite barely coding in Elixir. When I do, I can look for inspiration in other people's code. I rarely feel this way with Kotlin or Java libs, and I'm only slowly warming up to TypeScript code.

irrational 7y ago

Decades ago I became a much much better web developer by reading the source code of web pages. Unfortunately that is rarely possible to do anymore. I really feel the web is the worse for it.

diroussel 7y ago
I find it surprising how often you can see a web page you like, and then go and find the repo on GitHub that built it. Definitely for open source organisations, but also often for consultancies and government agencies.

kureikain 7y ago

I run a newsletter[0] that has a section call "Code to read" for many language. I tried to include small/interesting repos to do weird/cool things so people can learn about it. Eg, this code: https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch (UI in Python but the logic is Go) --- [0]: https://betterdev.link https://betterdev.link

JDiculous 7y ago

Seeing well architected code bases is how I went from total noob to "professional". You can't know what's good code if you've never seen good code before. There really should be a list of "good" codebases for people to look at and study. If anyone has any good backend Node.js codebase recommendations, I'd love to take a look.

pinkfoot 7y ago
Read the git source code.
Kaze404 7y ago
It's not exactly what you're asking for, but recently I started using Nest.js and it's been a godsend. It's a very opinionated framework, which means you can skip all the bootstrapping and go straight to building the actual application.

SeriousM 7y ago

Stating the obvious. Reading source code, no matter what quality it is will make you a better engineer. Reading software architecture focused material (books, blogs...) will make you a better architect.

aryamaan 7y ago
Some suggestions for the resources in the architecture domain? Actually, I wouldn't mind a comprehensive guide about it. It needs not to go in the details in all of them but at least should name them.

naveen99 7y ago

Read the source of the libraries you use and the functions you want to modify or fork.