When working in a big unfamiliar code base, I: * have a goal to do something like, save some image data for example * just dig around trying to find where the

When working in a big unfamiliar code base, I: * have a goal to do something like, save some image data for example * just dig around trying to find where the right place is to get the data I need * hack in code to see if I can get the damn thing to work at all * once its working, try to do do it neatly if I can * don't worry too much about not understanding everything - it can take months to work out how a system works. This only comes through doing lots and lots of iterations of hacking in little fixes and along the way learning what you can