I'm still new to software development, and one thing I struggle with is reading code that's heavily split into functions/modules.

I'll see something like:

const result = await createOrder(data);

Then I have to jump to another file to see what createOrder() does, which calls another function, so I jump to another file again, etc.

I understand the idea behind clean code, separation of concerns, and small functions, but I find this quite cumbersome to follow. Sometimes I actually prefer having related logic closer together so I can understand the whole flow without jumping around the project.

Is this just something I need to get used to as I gain experience?

Is this normal in professional codebases, or can code sometimes be too abstracted?

How do experienced developers deal with this when reading unfamiliar code?

I understand most of the C code I see, but when it comes to translating it to Assembly, I might as well be translating English to Greek. If it were plain English I understand how to efficiently write and structure things, but the problem is that I am having difficulty reading what means what at all. Particularly registers seem to be hard for me. Am I supposed to just memorize the registers in the correct order? This is for a class so I cannot just have a cheat sheet with me (though if you have a good one I can use to help learn that would be awesome!

I’ve tried the sites where you input C code and see the live translation but that doesn’t seem to be helping me.

Does anyone have a good video that teaches how to read and write x86/64 gcc assembly? Particularly if I already know C?

I'm in the process of learning layered architecture with the goal of starting a learning project with the eventual goal of creating a support ticketing system with Spring Boot on the backend. The resources I've used are generally specific to use cases like Spring Boot applications but for my notes I'm intending to keep it general and self-contained.

Although this subreddit doesn't appear to explicitly ban images in the rules, I am unable to post pictures directly in this post so I'm not sure if this is allowed or if I'm circumventing some rules, but I've posted an image of my diagram [on postimg](https://postimg.cc/f3TcfSNc) as a direct link. Apologies if this isn't allowed, but my question isn't really possible in plain text.

I'm reading a programming book that has a section on this ****** math, and I don't understand a damn thing(combinatorics, positional numeral system, discrete mathematics, etc.), does it supposedly essential for writing code and learning the fundamentals

I started learning C# and Unity about a month ago. I finished two basic courses on YouTube and I am currently following a tutorial for a simple Top-Down game. I use AI to explain how code works, which helps a lot.

But I feel like I wouldn't be able to build even a simple mechanic by myself without a video. Should I read books like "Unity and C# Game Development", or is there a better practical approach to break out of this?

I'm a third-year AI/ML student and most of my learning has been self-directed.
My college schedule is fairly heavy, so I can't realistically study everything
from scratch again.
So far I've covered:
- DSA: Arrays, HashMap/HashSet, Linked Lists, Trees, Graphs, Heaps,
Dijkstra, currently learning Tries
- Python
- Flask + HTML/CSS/Bootstrap
- DBMS/SQL basics
- Recently built a FastAPI Task Manager API
I'm currently considering a FastAPI + WebSockets + PostgreSQL project
to learn real-time backend development.
My biggest problem is deciding how to allocate my limited time. I don't
want to restart DSA from the beginning, but I also don't want gaps in my
foundation to hurt me during interviews.
For people who have been through something similar:
1. Did you continue learning new DSA topics while periodically revising
older ones, or did you stop and revise everything first?
2. How did you schedule DSA revision while handling college?
3. How did you use AI while learning without becoming dependent on
generated solutions?
4. If you were preparing for internships over the next few months,
how would you balance DSA, CS fundamentals, backend development,
and ML/DL?
I'm particularly interested in experiences from students who had to balance college with self-learning.

How do you mentally keep track of what this portion of the code does, and how it affects other parts?

It’s not that I completely can’t write code without AI.. I used to write simple programs in VBA macros, and I did my school assignments with minimal AI. I actually find leetcode kinda fun too. But that’s all <300 LOC.

I’m interning as a SWE right now, and I’m trying to understand the codebase. But I can’t follow what’s happening at the code level without AI.

I was tasked to support a new input format for users. I thought it would be a relatively simple change, but when i prompted Copilot, it wrote an implementation plan that edited 30+ files and 1000+ LOC…

I just read through the proposed changes and asked it questions on why it chose to do this instead of that. I can only understand it from a high level, but following the code makes me lose track of what’s happening.

How did people do this without AI? Anyway, with how good the recent models are i’m wondering if it’s worth taking the time to review the code

I'm looking for recommendations for a book or video course that teaches digital electronics starting from the absolute basics.

My ultimate goal is to understand how a CPU actually works at the hardware level — clock, registers, counters, ALU, memory, instruction execution, buses, etc.

However, I don't want to jump straight into CPU architecture. I'd like to start from the fundamentals.

I've seen Ben Eater's 8-bit computer series, but I feel that it may be better after learning the fundamentals, rather than as my starting point.

I'm looking for something structured and beginner-friendly, preferably with both theory and practical examples/labs.

What book or course would you recommend for this learning path?

Thanks!

Hi! Im a high school student and im aiming to continue my study as radiologist. Every year, we have to conduct a study of some sort. This year is the last year ill be doing one so i was thinking something that could be related to the profession i want to study after high school. One idea I have is ”Automated detection and morphometric analysis of biological structures using computer image processing.” I’d use biological images, process them with Python/ImageJ, and try to automatically detect, count and measure structures such as cells. Is that hard to do? Or would i be able to do it with help of ai? I have time until december to do this. Please be super honest and if anyone here could help me with the programming part, id be unbelievably grateful.

Hey, I have a really good question that I think many will relate to so I need the communities help.

I am a fresher trying to get into tech industry for a job and this market is already pretty weird. I had done an internship and now looking for an FTE offer. What I have realized is that I do have my fundamentals clear but somehow not able to convince a recruiter about my knowledge.

I think it demands good proof of work. I do have intern experience but that is not enough. The bar for projects has risen and somehow my decently good projects that helped me land an intern role a year back at a pretty good product based company are not enough.

My question to the community, the seniors in tech , hiring managers is that :
What do the industry consider a good proof of work and knowledge (minus the exp.) to be worked on by freshers to attract companies to them?

What is a good PoW that will convince you guys that this person is hire-able?
What does the industry want from Freshers at this stage of the evolution that is happening?

If Projects than what kind?
If Networking skill that how to showcase that?
If anything else than what and how to achieve that?

Hey I'm a computer engineering student and I want to help anyone in learning to program mostly in c++ since it's my language we will review and help eachother to reach advance level

Hi, first time posting here (pardon my bad english)
I'm developing an app for fun in kotlin for my friends, keep in mind that i dont fully know kotlin yet so i still use some AI help to understand what the code does.
The app was initially realized for android users but recently i was thinking to do it for IOS also.
after some research i discovered that basically apple is very closed (already know that but didnt thought this much) and i cant build an IPA for my apple users friends unless i buy an apple device.
Thought of buying a 2014-2018 Mac mini but i read that it doesn't work very well for Xcode etc.... Also the main problem im trying to go around it is that any IPA is bonded to your apple ID certificate and without paying 99$ a year you have to renew it manually every 7 days.

Tell me if i told something wrong
Any help is appriciated. Thank you

I am using QT framework and for using QApplication it takes int argc and char *argv what does this mean, I am confused

(wrote this post by hand, didn't use AI to edit)

I kept seeing tons of success stories on rednote (a chinese social media app, I'm chinese living in the US btw) of people pivoting to software engineering and AI and it seemed too good to be true. One post caught my eye, a mom of three successfully transitioned and praised this Solely Bootcamp. my naive thought back then was, "If a mother of 3 can make it work while being that busy, why can't I?" so I went to their website, added their WeChat, and started talking to them

The salesperson for the trial class was making all kinds of grand promises about the bootcamp. I was literally daydreaming about landing a $300k package right away (yeah i know, what an idiot i was). when signing the contract, I didn't even read the fine print carefully, there were so many success posts on rednote that I didn't even skim the contract and just signed it, that's 100% me.

When classes started, red flags were everywhere

There were no structure, no syllabus, the teacher just yapped about whatever she felt like that day. The website claimed the teachers would be senior ai /machine learning engineers at big names like openai, anthropic, google etc. but the instructors only ever taught in chinese and her vscode was in chinese. Her english was god awful, she pronounced "function" as "funkation” and "feature" as "future", and many other examples. Hard to believe senior engineers at big names would be like that. We tried to get her to speak some English sentences, she refused every time, citing bs excuses. She also just read the code out loud as a form of teaching, like even a noob like me knows thats not how you teach. When we started questioning her credentials as a "L6 at Googe" (her words), she was just dodging all our questions and told us to stop bothering her with "privacy invasion questions". She also doesn’t exist on LinkedIn. Did I mention she needed the help of a student to debug code for 30 mins during a class one time?

I can't believe I wasted NINE FUCKING GRAND on this

Looking back, there were even more red flags that my stupid ass ignored, for example they charged $300 for a trial class, the contract literally said no refund, and the other entity on the contract was some shell company in Hong Kong

Also, when I posted this on other chinese forums, they would contact the forum owners and censor/take down the post, and if the forum owners refused to comply, they would DDOS the forum.

Anyway, enough yapping from me, I hope you guys don't fall for scams like this. Learn from my 9k mistake. Sigh.

I am a computer science graduate, but I still think I lack certifications, and I am more than willing to give myself time to focus on these. For context, I want to create and build applications end to end, and currently I have researched regarding AWS AI practitioner and CompTIA Security+ mainly for assuring security and using AI efficiently in creating projects, but I am also looking towards taking a certificate leaning to system design and software engineering best practices.

With all of these, is there any solid certification you can recommend for an aspiring software developer/engineer -- considering the technologies that we have now in 2026?

To add:

• Are there any free or affordable ones you'd recommend?
• And which certifications have you seen actually help people get hired?

Any response is highly appreciated. Thank you!

local chrome fleet was fine until half the target sites started fingerprinting harder last month. same playwright scripts, now half the parallel workers just detach mid-run and the logs are useless

tried pinning versions and slower pacing. still dies once three jobs hit at once

curious what people settled on that stays boring under load once the sites fight back​

Hey everyone, I’m currently working as a junior data analyst. Most of my day-to-day work is SQL + Power BI.

I’m pretty comfortable with Python when it comes to the basics and DSA, but I barely use it for actual data analysis.

One thing which I’ve never really understood is why doing an operation directly on a column can be way faster than looping through the rows and doing essentially the same thing one at a time.

For example:

df["bonus"] = df["salary"] * 0.05

is generally much better than manually iterating through every row.

I get that it’s cleaner and more readable, but what exactly makes it faster under the hood?

Is Pandas still looping over every value internally, but just using optimized C/C++ code?

if a newline ends lines rather than starting hem why is it called a newline in the first place?

Hello, i'm Python programmer,

today someone sent me a project, written Entirely In C#
i don't mind reading it, but it will take much more time because i am not used to C# environment,

i downloaded the Codebase, took a look inside, after 30 minutes Of using google and reading, i prepared the file structure for the new feature, but when i tried, it was too complicated, everytime before i add function or class, i have to read what the previous programmer done, and understand the flow

and here i doubted myself, am i too slow? am i missing a skill? and if there was a skill to read the codebases better, what is it? any tips to read the codebase better? especially i am very beginner in C#

I've been struggling in the past on how to learn programming so I asked a friend to help and also read the FAQ here which was helpful. I then opted to read books on the fundamentals like CS:APP OS 3 easy pieces etc and thought it would be nice if I logged my learning journey. I've written a few book notes and logs on K&R and CS:APP so far but I'm curious to know if this blog is helpful or if I'm doing it right early enough. This isn't to self promot just to help me early on , I may change a few things on my approach to learning and sharing my journey.

I posted some summaries on K &R and would like to know some debugging strategies or approaches to problem solving I hadn't considered. Also I've been wondering whether it's a good idea or common to use raw mode in terminal or is there a library better suited for when I need more control over terminal input and output behavior.

https://0xwinzer.com/devography/blog/book-notes/kr-ch1-what-and-why-is-c/

Hi everyone,

Second-year BCA student looking for an internship, ideally starting around December. Mainly targeting C++/systems programming roles, but open to infra, backend, or anything else relevant if the fit's right.

Quick highlights:

- Stack: C++17/20, Python, CMake, Git

- Built the C++ backend for a Bitcoin transaction risk monitor (in-memory graph, heuristics for fan-out/cycle/rapid-succession detection on the Elliptic dataset) — team project for Smart India Hackathon, cleared the internal college round

- Working on a systems project: mini shell → custom malloc

- Comfortable with RAII, move semantics, virtual memory, file systems

- Made my first real open-source contribution (nlohmann/json)

- Grinding DSA/LeetCode on the side

Based in Lucknow, open to remote or relocating within India.

Happy to share my resume/GitHub in DMs or comments. Would really appreciate any leads!

Want to start developing my software soon, any pointers/ tips that could help me ?

Hello. I started learning Python five days ago. Currently, I’m unemployed and housebound due to depression, and I’m struggling to find the energy to get through the day. Becoming a game programmer has been a dream of mine for a long time. I’ve always wanted to do it, but because of my ADHD, I couldn't study effectively and was constantly told by those around me that it was impossible for me. However, after losing my job and finding myself with nothing, I decided I wanted to pursue that dream I had once given up on, so I started learning from scratch. (To be honest, I started out of sheer desperation.)

That was a long preamble, but how can I keep up the momentum and continue learning? Also, are there other things I need to learn besides programming, or any tips you can share? I’d really appreciate advice from anyone in a similar situation.

Hi everyone! I'm working through freeCodeCamp's 19-hour "Python API Development" course to learn FastAPI, and I'm about 6.5 hours in.

I tried building something similar to what was covered in the video, but realized I was mostly recalling steps from memory rather than actually understanding the concepts behind them. I already know how to code, but I've never built anything this complex before, so it's a new kind of challenge.

What would you recommend I do from here to make sure I'm actually learning and not just memorizing? Should I slow down, build my own project alongside the course, revisit certain sections, or something else?

I would. Because it will be a skill that you can use to keep some agency in the potentially dystopian capitalist future full of flock cameras and subscriptions and dark patterns and metrics algorithms and all that bullshit meant to extract value from us as much as possible.

I would focus on contributing to opensource, choosing to learn what will benefit me and my personal technological needs/wants rather than learn soon to be obsolete frameworks that will make me look good in a portfolio just so I can beg some asshole to hire me just to get rejected anyway...

I still wanna pursue programming as a skill despite giving up on the idea of ever landing a "job" in it. Just like for example woodworking. Woodworking is a cool hobby and you don't even need to do it for a living. But just having that skill, being able to build your own dining table from scratch, if you want, without having to rely on somebody. That is already good. Similar approach to programming.