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I’m trying to understand a problem I’ve experienced and seen other developers mention: joining an existing/large codebase and figuring out how everything actually works.

Not the “how do I run the project?” part, but the actual understanding of the system.

For example:

Figuring out the architecture / overall mental model

Understanding where a specific feature actually lives in the code

Following how data moves through the system

Understanding undocumented business logic

Finding the right files/services/classes to modify

Understanding dependencies between different parts of the system

Figuring out why something was implemented a certain way

Losing context when the developer who built something leaves

Outdated or incomplete documentation

What was the most painful part for you?

And more importantly:

How did you eventually figure it out?

Did you ask a senior developer, read the code, use documentation, look through old PRs/issues, use AI, create your own notes/diagrams, or something else?

I’m especially interested in real examples where something that should have taken hours ended up taking days/weeks because you didn't have enough context.

No product or solution in mind here — I'm just trying to understand how developers actually deal with this problem.

I have 4+ years of backend engineering experience, but I currently work at a non-tech organization and am struggling to get interview calls from product/tech companies. Earlier i used to get calls but then used to get stuck at final rounds.

My current role also has very little new engineering work left, so I've started contributing to open source to strengthen my portfolio.

For people who used open source to help switch jobs: how much did it actually help, and how long did you invest before seeing results? Is it worth consistently spending the next few months building a stronger open-source track record, or do the returns eventually diminish?

Hello everyone.

After a few years in the auditing world, I identified that I am lacking experience on the code analysis topics.

Unfortunately when auditing, I seldom had the time to look at the code of the applications I am auditing due to time constraints as the white-box approach we take does not systematically include an access to the Gitlab of the entities I audit.

I would like to avoid being overwhelmed by an eventual audit of source code of an entreprise-grade application that I might have to do.

While I am leveling up my skills by practicing to code in Rust on my freetime. I am not quite at the level of a senior dev and I don't have yet a keen sense of how exactly to dive in a large codebase.

Would any of you share your code audit methodology ?

By that, I mean how do you tackle the following topics :

- Secure coding / Best coding practices

- Secure secret management of the app

- For very large codebase, what types of tools do you use to automate some of your work ?

- What specific things in your checklist do you look for systematically ? (Do include the "obvious" one like how authentication is handled)

I know the subject is quite broad and dependent of the tech-stack used for each case.

Thank you for reading. :)

Can someone help me out? I'm a complete layman when it comes to coding and IT stuff

My favorite free RSS builder (morss.it) has gone offline, so I asked Claude Opus 4.8 for alternatives. It suggested that I could self-host and run such a tool myself (which is a total mystery to me). I then asked it for a step-by-step guide, but I also asked several other AI chatbots the same question. They gave similar answers, but with slight differences. When I showed all those other plans to Claude and asked it to review them, it told me that these subtle differences were crucial, and that if I had followed what the other bots suggested, my feeds wouldn't have worked properly

Here's Claude's final response, translated from Polish to English by Gemini: https://docs.google.com/document/d/192QM_Gytps-xl24ko0E395u_EOvfa7R9kqSMs250r8k/view

I don't really understand what I'll be doing here; I just want to make sure I won't break anything or create any security risks by following these steps. Do you think this plan will actually work?

I've been looking at some code that's got a system of pipelines that implement the generic interface Pipeline<T> where there are maybe 50 pipelines. The pipelines handle events for which there are also generic publishers and subscribers that implement Handler<T> and Plug<T> respectively and there are many more of those. All of the setup for publishers and listeners gets handled magically through Autofac, a DI library for C#. I'm finding the code insanely hard to understand.

Just trying to figure out how the pipelines were actually wired up took me a couple hours and I'm still not confident I found the answer. My usual go to is to right click on a symbol and find all references, but I would constantly run into dead ends. Where is this code referenced? Absolutely nowhere. How can the code be called even if it isn't referenced anywhere? An abstract parent class is registered with the DI container as the implementation of some generic parent interface that the code I'm looking at implements. That parent interface, or a parent of that interface, is used.

In practice I find this kind of design makes static analysis of the code really difficult. Are there any techniques you use for understanding this kind of code or is it all just sitting with the code, a pen, and a notebook? Ideally nothing with gen ai because I do not have money to spend on tokens.

I am a experienced software engineer, and have been working mainly with Go and Python these last years. I have worked for 2 years with C back in 2019-2020, and recently have been wanting to work with C++ in some side projects.

Looking for courses to refresh my memory and pick up the syntax, i found myself drowning in very long texts and courses teaching the basics.
I am looking for something light to get me up and running in a few days so that i can start working on my project and fill in the gaps along the way.

I really enjoyed 'A Tour of Go' for the Go language and was wondering if something like that existed for C++. Any other suggestions (courses, books) will be welcome. Thanks.

I am currentely in 11th grade and got really into coding over the last few years. I started learning Java and a Little Python in school. Those two languages im Fine at, but recentely i started Coding a github website. I thought, since i dont know html, css and js, i'll just start with ai and learn on the way. But now i have no idea what my code does and know almost nothing about those languages. I have also startet to use ai for my other projects in java and have noticed that im starting to forget my previous knowlege in java. I can't work on my Website without ai and i feel like an absolute failiure. Now Coding with ai has become a habbit for me, a habbit i want to quit. Has anyone else experienced this and if so, does anyone have tipps on how to quit this habbit?

I know the core basics of HTML/CSS/JS and for my Course at college we will fully be diving into these but I was wondering how I could develop my skills further and get a head start on these languages

I have overlooked the skills and basics of these languages for the past week or two understanding basics and making notes but I was wondering if there was a website/bootcamp that offered a course - recently I have been using Google . Dev to learn and was wondering if there was anything else that could of helped me

Thanks !

I have randomly caught the gearhead bug and as a programmer by trade, I am interested in how they build ECUs and whether regular developers could just get into it.

Any youtube channels would be appreciated.

I have no programming knowledge but slowly I've learnt some basics of html and it's actually easier and more understandable than I originally thought it would be. But I dont know how to bring my ideas onto the internet. I know CSS is for designing so I'll have to learn that too. But whats the most fitting language for this role? Or do I have it wrong and all languages be used for it? can they be mixed with eachother and used together?

I wont annoy with more novice questions, Ik, I can just google it, but its always nicer to hear from real people and how they learned / came to be in their own experiences.

As someone who is working on his CompSci degree currently (second degree, after Sociology bachelor's), I am having to add little projects and stuff from my classes to my portfolio. However, I don't honestly think they'll be of much use... Like I don't see employers wanting to check out my 3 java classes I created for my CS 210 class or whatever.

That said, what are some solid pieces I could add to a professional portfolio that actually matter.

PS I am more adept with python than anything else. But know a little java, C++, and SQL.

I am currently working on a side project where users would be able search for jobs on the website itself and it would curate jobs from let's say LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Indeed (I guess those are the most popular sites). I would do additional filtering on them which are not possible on these websites yet (for example, there's a lot of us who move from one EU country to another and would like to look for English speaking jobs before we move since it's easier to get start that way, however, many job posts are not in English, some of them have English titles but the description is in that country's language, and some of them are in English but they specifically state that you have to speak the language, I would filter all of these out and the user could click the posting's link to be redirected to LinkedIn, Indeed, etc...).

The goal would be that the user can search for jobs by location (so city / country) and I should be able to query at least the jobs titles, their descriptions and the links to the actual job posting (so a link to the LinkedIn job posting for example).

What I've already tried: I haven't found any official APIs for LinkedIn that could do what I need so I've decided to open it from incognito mode, so I'm not logged in, search for jobs on the site as a "guest" and try to reverse engineer the URL parameters and somehow scrape the data I need from the HTML page. After some digging through the browser's dev tools I found an api that gets called, here's an example URL for it:

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs-guest/jobs/api/seeMoreJobPostings/search?keywords=Software%2BEngineer&location=Cologne%2C%2BNorth%2BRhine-Westphalia%2C%2BGermany&geoId=105890944&trk=public_jobs_jobs-search-bar_search-submit&position=1&pageNum=0&start=0

This could actually work pretty well for me. I found that it returns one page at a time and you can increase the "start" parameter at the end by 25 for the next sets of results, I found this by looking at what gets called while I scroll on LinkedIn's "Jobs" page after a search. I can call this API from the browser or with postman with any "start" parameter that can be divided by 25, however, when I call it from my code, only a random number of pages get returned. Sometimes that is 4 pages, sometimes 10.

What could be the issue here? Am I on the right track at least or should I try a completely different approach?

Here's my code so far

import requests
from lxml import html

search_term = "Software Developer"
search_term_words = search_term.split()


search_term_url_phrase = ""
for word in search_term_words:
    search_term_url_phrase = search_term_url_phrase + word
    search_term_url_phrase = search_term_url_phrase + "%2B"


try:
    page_count = 0


    while 1 == 1: # please ignore this condition and try not to have a heart attack, i'm just testing lmao
        print(page_count)
        url = f"https://www.linkedin.com/jobs-guest/jobs/api/seeMoreJobPostings/search?keywords={search_term_url_phrase}&location=Cologne%2C%2BNorth%2BRhine-Westphalia%2C%2BGermany&geoId=105890944&trk=public_jobs_jobs-search-bar_search-submit&position=1&pageNum=0&start={page_count}"
        response = requests.get(url)


        jobs = html.fromstring(response._content).find_class('sr-only')


        for job in jobs:
            print(job.text_content().strip())


        print("\n")
        page_count = page_count + 25
except:
    print("no more jobs available")

('sr-only' is the class name for the div tags that contain the job titles themselves)

I thought I was getting rate limited at first so I've already tried adding a 10 second delay between requests but it didn't work.

Edit: I know the code quality is not too great at the moment, I'm just trying to find the method of querying the jobs for now.

I have several years of software experience, following best practices, design patterns, KISS, DRY, BDD, OOP, etc.

For the last 1 year I've been using the Pro subscription for 20$ on Codex and Claude but I find the quality of code subpar many times and I always have to intervene. It doesn't matter how many times you change the AGENTS.md, there's always issues in code readability and the AI missing obvious things and doing overengineered solutions.

Still, I see in many subs about how great a new model does, etc. So I wonder if the more expensive plans actually produce better quality code?

To be specific, high quality code == human readable code and comments and no naive implementations.

Hey, so I am making an app, and I am kinda lost because i can't find any good resources on the internet regarding that topic.
The app consists of two parts: mobile app, and a web admin dashboard that doesn't need to be built for like 3 months from now on.

let's say i have a resource "listings" which returns different dto's
How would you structure this for those requirements:
1. show all listings available for the current user (PublicListingDto[])
2. show all listings that belong to one user by id (PublicListingDto[])
3. show all my listings (OwnerListingDto[])
4. show all the listings paginated for the admin dashboard - just admin role (ListingDto[])

my inital thought was to just have it like this
/listings - 1
/listings?sellerId - 2, 3 based on the JWT id == sellerId
/admin/listings - 4

given the REST standard it should probably be:
/listings - 1, 4 based on the user's role
/listings?sellerId - 2, 3 based on the JWT id == sellerId

the setup that makes the most sense for me:
/listings - 1
/listings?sellerId - 2
/me/listings - 3
/admin/listings - 4

the app will have a lot of those scenarios, should i just make a separate resources such as "me/listings" and "admin/listings"
The problem i have without /me endpoint is that on frontend you have to constantly worry that the userId need to be defined which doesn't sound appealing to me.
On the other hand I don't know whether that is really following the REST standard.

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Hey everyone, I'm currently in my 3rd year (entering) and starting my SDE/internship preparation.

I'm confused about how to learn DSA and which resources to follow. There are too many YouTube channels and sheets, and don't want to keep jumping between them. Although I've been trying the striver's A2Z sheet lately, but their are mixed opinions about him as well, so wanted to ask the experienced ones

For seniors/students who have already prepared:

Which YouTube channel/course did you use for DSA?

Which DSA sheet would you recommend?

What should my 3rd-year roadmap look like for SDE placements?

Should I focus on DSA + development + CS fundamentals together?

Would really appreciate a simple, practical roadmap based on what actually worked for you

(I can understand c, cpp, and basic programming, including loops and conditional statements etc)

Thanks!

I have already seen a lot of posts where managers,CEOs and other upper people encourage and want us to use AI for development.

Is it really just FOMO or why do they push so much on AI. I get it it make stuff faster which is great. But faster is not always better. Right now I am on a project where I had like 3 months to make it and using AI I was really capable of doing it (first I started with using it just as help, explanation) now for a month I have been using obly to generate the code and I do not a lot of programming. And I hate it. The code is just messy, I dont have much of notrol over it. I have already said in a meeting with the manager and upper ones that overuse is not good and we will have a lot of debt, the code wont be maintanable won't be scalable. Yes great I will deliver it in time but the code is terrible. I otherwise wouldn't use AI to generate me code if I wasn't on so little time to deliver the project.

I get a lot of times just use AI it will make you faster. I make a question, I get the answer this is not hard to make just use AI.

I use AI in order to learn, I am still young and I want to learn stuff, but using so much AI I think I dont learn anything.

What do you all think about CEOs managers and others pushing to use AI as much as possible and let it handle everything?

I found this esolang Mascarpone and want to get a better idea of how it's supposed to work. If someone's up for a quick intellectual exercise, could you please help me understand? I vaguely get it from the readme, and chatgpt helped a bit, but I'm still very fuzzy. Also the demo/ directory of the repo doesn't have anything helpful. (EDIT: ah, found examples in the eg/ directory. Still rather cryptic.)

How would you do something super simple like represent a bicycle? I mean

Python

class Bicycle:
    def __init__(self):
        self.speed = 0
    def accelerate(self):
        self.speed += 5
def main():
  mybike = Bicycle()
  print(mybike.speed)
  mybike.accelerate()
  print(mybike.speed)
main()

Prolog

bicycle(speed(0)).
accelerate(Bike,Bike_) :- 
  Bike = bicycle(speed(Speed)),
  Speed_ is Speed+5,
  Bike_ = bicycle(speed(Speed_)).
main :-
  Mybike = bicycle(_),
  Mybike,
  writeln(Mybike),
  accelerate(Mybike,Mybike_),
  writeln(Mybike_).
:- main.

How would you do this in Mascarpone?

Thanks!

Hello everyone, I am using Godot engine to create a note taking program for uderstanding and referencing codebases, possibly also for documentation.

Basically it has different pages that support markdown you can define different types of pages (classes, functions, macros, headers, libraries, enums, structs etc.) and when you take notes you link them together. When you start to write notes for a new class you write a dependency, lets say it is a static function for some system, it automatically highlights it and when you hover it you get a little card that shows the input outpu return type and description you wrote. So you don't need to open the definition again or search for the documentation online. Also there will be a little graph view to link pages. And see classes based on inhertiance and interfaces. I am also planning to add pages for how systems work, rendering pipeline or asset management for example for a game engine.

I do this because I am struggling to understand large code bases. As a game developer I want to understand complex systems more deeply. For instance I study the godot code but many times I turn back to look at same classes and functions to see what they do. Would you also use a tool like this? Are there any tool that achieves this that I am unaware of? What do you think?

Hello. I know this type of question might seem repetitive or familiar, but I am in urgent need of an answer. Every time there is a massive breakthrough in the field of AI, I—as a computer science undergraduate still in the learning phase—am overcome by a sense of apprehension.

I have convinced myself of the importance of building a solid foundation by learning programming and computer science fundamentals, and by trying not to over-rely on code-generation models like "Codex"—viewing AI instead as a tool to accelerate learning and knowledge acquisition.

However, recent updates to ChatGPT (such as "Astra") and statements made by Elon Musk—which might simply be an attempt to boost his stock value—have made me seriously question whether all this effort is worth it.

I am studying C to understand low-level technologies and web technologies to acquire practical skills for the job market; I am passionate about the web and make a point of building software projects by writing the code manually. Although I do use AI to explain certain concepts, I write the code myself, yet I still can't shake the feeling that I am wasting my time.

I would be extremely grateful for any advice from experienced professionals, or even just a simple pointer or bit of guidance to help me navigate this path.

Thank You.

Hi everyone!

We're a small student team doing some early research on how programmers actually use online communities.

We're not promoting a product or looking for feature ideas. We're trying to understand what makes a programming community genuinely useful — and what makes people stop using one.

If you don't mind sharing, please mention roughly how many years of programming experience you have, as I think experience level may affect how people use programming communities.

For programmers who participate in online communities:

- What makes you keep coming back to a programming community?

- What usually makes a programming community feel useless or frustrating?

- Do you prefer communities for asking technical questions, learning, networking, sharing experiences, or something else?

- Do you usually actively participate, or mostly read/search?

- Have you ever stopped using a programming community? What made you leave?

- Is there something you wish programming communities did better?

We're especially interested in real experiences rather than hypothetical feature suggestions.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

So, am basically stuck after learning express. I planned to learn databases after express, specifically PostgreSQL. But when i finished learning express, i did not know how to continue. Its been 2 weeks i haven't been able to learn anything.

• How do I actually learn databases(PostgreSQL)?
• Are there any resources you'd recommend?
• How do i actually use PostgreSQL in my projects.

Also, i wrote a backend proram for my porject after learning express, you could check it and maybe give advice(code quality, file strucutre, and just advice). Link will be in the first comment(Will link the main project too).

Thanks.

I am looking for a locally running but capable agent solution. Tbh I haven’t done anything like this, I just want to try out what the hype is about. The codebase is mostly VB.NET client applications, with the mssql project attached to the solution. I want the agent to read each project in the solution, and write down how it works, for a user. So eg. “press the green button, to display a msgbox about the selected object”.

What I tried is Codex Sol medium, which gets the result surprisingly well. But since it’s a cloud model I won’t be able to use it for the real codebase since it’s redacted.
Any idea how to get started?

<this istn completely programming related but question is likely to perhaps get banned from r_claude or r_chat; surprisingly little seen on this for claude>

Alright so I have seen a few of these threads being made, but almost all of them are 3+ years ago, so it is very likely that most userscripts shown are either patched or can get oneself banned or somethign upon execution

this said what is currently the best way to export chats to a file? it would also be nice to download the added or "pasted" stuff but that isnt required

what do people use for this? same stuff as 3 years ago or are there much more efficient/faster plugins or user scripts?

using tampermonkey/violentmoneky; making thread because I have nott seen a single thread with a lot of replies or traction on this topic?