Ask HN: How Do You Handle Looking at Large Codebases?

1 pointworldsavior1 comment

I'm working on a few big projects, I'm experiencing a bit of uncertainty and forgetting what I did 300 lines back. How do you handle this type of situations where you need to read your own code or others when it comes to large ones?

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Divide your project into independent modules:

- So after you build a module, you only have to remember the interface to the module: what does it input? What does it output? You can forget about the implementation details.

- If you need to later fix a problem in that module, you only need to remember the interface to other modules it interacts with.

- Good self-documenting names and comments will help.

- It's like when you use 3rd party modules: you just need to understand the API it exposes, not the underlying implementation details.

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