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Comment by tiogemini | Hacker News Reader

How do you balance reading code with getting things done? I'm thinking of the "move fast and break stuff" attitude that doesn't seem to leave much room for reading a lot of code. I believe that reading and understanding the code will help you move faster eventually, but you're slower to start. So, how do you know when you've read enough?

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I just accept I'm a sprinter when it comes to coding, not a marathon runner. I spend 2 or 3 hours poking the code with a stick, proverbially speaking, reading it, maybe pruning crappy code, maybe faffing around, then bash out the actual code in an hour or two.

I believe what happens is that I form a mental map of the business process and a mental map of the code and then when I eventually come to write something, it just pours out.

Psychologically, it took me a long time to accept that only actually coding 2 or 3 hours a day is fine. For years I beat myself up for being 'lazy'.

EDIT: I mean, it's obviously different if you're just adding an extra column to an existing table or something (usually) trivial like that.

IMHO, the answer to this question is to frequently ask yourself this question as you're working on things. There's no perfect balance, you'll have to make a decision depending on the context and priorities of the moment. It might be ok to gloss over a concept you're unfamiliar with if debugging a production issue and having evidence that the root cause of the bug is in another area of the code altogether. But then make some time during feature development (or when writing a COE about the production issue) to go back to that piece of code and dig deeper into why it's written that way.

To expand on the analogy of the OP with regards to unfamiliar words in a novel, I personally don't look up every single word that I come across when I can get an idea of what it means from the context, but only after I encounter it a few times.

Good points. Thinking about the unfamiliar words analogy I would look up a word if I see it often enough or if it's key to understanding. Knowing if an unfamiliar word is important is tricky though--I can't define the process I use there.

It's clearly a trade-off. I have found that as I gain experience, reading code becomes faster, even for domains that I'm not familiar with, and it's nearly always worthwhile to understand the problem.

Moving fast and breaking things adds to the technical debt. The word debt implies that you will have to repay it (or at least, someone will have to repay it). So moving fast now means slowing down later. Sometimes this is desirable, sometimes not.

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