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mavidseron Ask HN: How do you familiarize yourself with a new codebase?

Well, I'm not very good at this either but here's what I do. I usually work on modular projects where there are hundreds of files in the project. I usually skip directly to locating the file where I've to make amends (using a lot of grep. grep for function and object definitions, grep for usage patterns, grep for checking how to implement something). Thus, I learn about the codebase as I go along.

Sure, this is not the best practice, and unsuitable for many, but it's what works for me.

mavidseron Microsoft to stop producing Windows versions

How will they deal with increasing requirements? At some time, the system requirements will increase, will the user be notified or what? Or will he have to figure out that the PC's getting slow, or things aren't working; it's time to upgrade.

mavidseron Ccat – syntax highlighting cat

Pretty sure there's no config file, as of now.

For what it's worth, here's[1] the file which describes the colors used in the source. List of colors[2].

[1] https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/pygments-main/src/a287342ee...

[2] https://bitbucket.org/birkenfeld/pygments-main/src/a287342ee...

mavidseron Ccat – syntax highlighting cat

There's also the "python-pygments" package which provides awesome syntax highlighting. You can alias it to ccat too:

    alias ccat='pygmentize -g'

mavidseron Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview

I remember that my first interview was kind of similar. Though it was a phone interview on Hackerrank Codepair.

I was really nervous, and since it was a phone interview, I tried to speak my thought process, which didn't quite work out due to me constantly stammering. So I just took to typing all the time so that my interviewer wouldn't think I was taking too long coming up with a language or copying answers. I started making silly mistakes like using `int sum=0` in python. I took the input as a number, converted it to a string, and then further converted it back to a number, and did mathematical operations on it, trying to solve the problem. Every time I thought I did it, it would get stuck in another case.

Ultimately, the interviewer deleted 50 lines out of my 60-line code, and just added a print statement on a variable I was already using for storing things temporarily, which turned out to be the correct answer.

Needless to say, I blew the interview. I haven't done an interview since, and I'm gonna be up for it very soon. I'm not sure if I'd do better this time, but I'd be ready with a glass of water, and try to be as relaxed as possible.