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Can you also suggest how much time one can expect to spend on a particular codebase (which are listed) to get any meaningful take-aways?

I am interested in exploring codebases now that I have sufficient experience and feel confident (and not initimidated). This will be useful because then I can start from the smaller (simpler) ones and move on to the complex ones later.

Any recommended path, please do suggest.

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It depends on the size and what you are trying to do. For example, lately I 've spent maybe a week studying Lucene, and kept going back to it every other day, because I needed to understand pretty much everything about it, to get ideas for improving Trinity ( https://github.com/phaistos-networks/Trinity ).

Some other codebases are so vast it takes a lot, lot longer to understand them enough to feel 'comfortable' navigating them (e.g the Unreal Engine codebase).

Most codebases however are quite small, and within 1 hour, or a few, you 'll be able to understand where to go to find what you need, which are the primary data structures and functions, etc.

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