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As others have said, tests are a great place to start. They give a bit more context. I also like looking for the entry point and seeing how the environment is created, and step through it from there.

Hopefully not self promotion, but I wrote a blog on this a while back: https://ruairidh.dev/how-to-understand-a-new-codebase

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Wisefin – Turn messy bank transactions into beautiful data

Really nice idea, great execution. Also great to see an Edinburgh company :)

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Which companies you know about that have a great interview process?

Stripe's interview process was really enjoyable. Professional and was relevant to the role.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)

Andrew and Sarah at Canny are both awesome and have a brilliant product. Would definitely recommend people apply!

ruairidhwmon Five common mistakes with React Hooks

Found this online and thought it was a good summary!

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2020)

  Location: Glasgow, Scotland

  Remote: Yes.

  Willing to relocate: Not immediately but potentially down the line.

  Technologies: React, Node, GraphQL, Postgres, TypeScript. Happy to learn others!

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruairidhwynnemchardy/

  Email: My username at gmail.

----

Former lawyer turned software engineer. I've been working in startups until recently and am open to a new opportunity. Ideally I'm looking for somewhere I can keep learning and growing my skills! Very used to working remotely.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Who Is Firing?

I just got laid off from a small startup because of COVID. Incredibly bleak given that they were a great company but nobody saw a situation where pretty much our entire market disappeared overnight with low chances of it returning in the near future.

It isn't much fun but that's the way of these things. Got to stay positive and will be checking the HN "Who's Hiring" threads.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

https://ruairidh.dev

It's a mix of my projects (things like computer vision for face detection, and recognising knives in images), to beginner articles on JS.

I'm a former lawyer turned software engineer, and am documenting what I have learned.

ruairidhwmon Can you recommend good technical newsletters to follow?

Better Dev Link (https://betterdev.link/) is excellent!

ruairidhwmon Tips on Understanding a New Codebase

I wrote a quick blog post over the weekend on my approach for understanding a new codebase as it's a position we've all been in.

I saw a thread about this the other day and wanted to hear from more people on how they do this!

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Domestica – Manage Your Successful Household

Interesting idea but here are a few points you might want to think about:

1. I don't imagine that most people us an app for the daily running of a household. I can see this working better for students in private accommodation, room mates, etc. Less so for couples and families.

2. The website doesn't really tell me why this will make my household successful. What's the value proposition? All I'm seeing just now is actually another layer of life admin as I need to input lots of data in the app.

3. The design could really use some work. That's not to be mean, but right now it's not hugely appealing and I nearly closed the tab immediately. It looks like the sort of system you might tolerate at work, but wouldn't want to use as part of your personal life. I'd recommend checking out some tips by Steve Schoger for design, consider using a theme, or paying someone to do this if you don't have time. It just doesn't really resonate with a potential user and erodes trust.

4. Who are you marketing this to? Think about it and tailor your copy / design accordingly.

Hope that helps!

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: What are the Madrid and Barcelona tech scenes like?

I lived in both Madrid and Barcelona for about a year each. They're very different cities.

Madrid:

I'd say this is more of a working city and has less of the mad tourism / party scene. There's a good tech scene present, with plenty of meetups and an increasing number of startups. Things like Google Campus are great spots to meet like-minded people, and there is plenty of work available but you may end up in more of an 'enterprise' style place.

Barcelona:

Very, very popular with tourists. This can be a downside depending on how much you like your peace and quiet. I lived in one of the busiest places for tourism (El Born) so I ended up quite used to the chaos.

With that said, it's an extremely international city and that shows in the amount of startups, co-working spaces, and meetups. It has more of a 'tech' vibe to it. There are some downsides however in that a lot of people there are quite transient, so it can be harder to make meaningful connections.

In terms of language, since you're fluent in English and Spanish then you'll have no problem in either city. Madrid is definitely more Spanish focused, whereas in Barcelona I ended up speaking more English and French than I did Spanish weirdly. It just depends on the crowd you're in.

Happy to discuss more, or put you in touch with people / recommend places if you want. My email is in my bio.

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Building a basic AI-powered security camera

This was a small project for me to solidify my own learning. It's very basic and essentially recognises my face, and tells anyone else to 'go away' using my computer's text-to-speech engine.

Although it's a silly side-project, it was fun to make and gave me a bit of insight into how facial-recognition works :)

ruairidhwmon Dear Devs, please stop using Medium for your contents

I moved off medium to self-host my blog via Gatsby and Netlify. It's a far nicer experience and I wouldn't go back!

ruairidhwmon Show HN: An Image Licensing Platform just for Instagram (example profile)

Nice!

I actually approached this problem from the other side a few years ago and made a service which let brands purchase the rights to users' Instagram photos. It was definitely an interesting experience, but this is a great way to help the users a bit.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Show your own blog/vlog

https://ruairidh.dev - general coding and my first image recognition project.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: If your job was remote, which city would you choose to live in?

I'm remote and live in Glasgow, Scotland. My partner is tied down with their location so I don't travel as much as I might otherwise, but I like it here and we have already lived abroad so it works out pretty well.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?

When I worked as a lawyer, one of my tasks as a junior was to check the court lists every day against the spreadsheet of clients we had who were involved in litigation. If their name appeared then I had to send an email to the relevant lawyer containing the information.

This took about 30 - 60 mins each day and was monotonous. Just copying and pasting the client name into the browser search tool.

I automated the process, making a small website which lawyers could add their client and would receive an email if the name appeared in the court lists. I ended up turning it into a small SaaS business for a while and sold a licence to my company.

Not a huge victory but it felt great at the time!

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Is GraphQL still relevant?

A platform which handles listings and bookings. I work primarily on the backend and haven't really felt any discomfort in terms of complexity. It just gives a lot of flexibility in how we work with the data that we have and what we can offer to the frontend.

The stack is GraphQL Yoga and Prisma which simplifies things quite a bit!

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Is GraphQL still relevant?

I'm using it at work to develop an API and I'd say that it's been a great experience. I find that it fits well with our use case.

I find it works well for when we need to collect information from several places at once which in our older API required several requests to REST endpoints. Now we have a single request and a much faster response time.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: How do you identify things worth to write about in your blog?

I typically write about things I'm learning about as a way to solidify my own knowledge. That or I write about something I wish I had known recently.

ruairidhwmon Haversine Formula

MySQL also offers this natively which allows for speed improvements compared to calculating it yourself in a script: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.7/en/spatial-convenience-...

ruairidhwmon Tracking the trackers: Draw connections between scripts and domains on website

Isn't this similar to the post on Automating OSINT - http://www.automatingosint.com/blog/2017/07/osint-website-co...?

Think the above has been mentioned on BellingCat too.

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: What books changed the way you think about almost everything?

Thanks for posting this, I can't wait to give it a listen!

ruairidhwmon Ask HN: Developers in Edinburgh?

Based between Edinburgh and Glasgow. My email is in my profile and happy to have a chat any time.

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language

Yeah - I was involved in helping a large company purchase one of these tools and it was a nightmare. The software was poorly made, and of course every corporation does things differently.

Part of the problem is that legal teams don't understand how this software works, and the companies that create it use salespeople who will promise all kinds of things, so you end up in the situation where an in-house team has been told it will cut down their hours by X%, the software isn't designed for whatever task it has been sold for, and it becomes a hack job to make it do so.

The areas like family law (or particularly executries) are great for document generators. Similarly in corporate where there is a lot more routine work. These have already come into law firms in a big way but it's not particularly innovative (though still welcome).

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language

I did a legal tech startup a while back, and now I'm looking for another opportunity :)

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language

I've been wanting to build a legal IDE for ages, it makes no sense that lawyers are stuck using Microsoft Word with lots of bolt-on plugins rather than a VSCode / Sublime equivalent.

ruairidhwmon Show HN: Crowdsourced freelance contract template, written in plain language

I've seen quite a few of these and whilst I love the idea, they usually have a ton of problems in them.

As tptacek pointed out - there is no chance that this document would survive first contact with a sophisticated party and any qualified lawyer would likely rip this to shreds.

Firstly there is no regard to the potential jurisdiction that the user chooses. If I were to put in England then that would mean there are different contractual implications to choosing Scotland. Ditto for states in the USA. A layperson won't know this, and a lawyer would need to review the provisions.

There are also a ton of generalised terms in this document where things like 'intellectual property rights' aren't defined. These aren't generic terms and in the event of a dispute, language really matters. There is a reason why contracts are much longer when professionally written.

This isn't to attack the idea, I'm hugely in favour of open access to legal documentation, but people need to realise that most legal work is bespoke - even if law firms do it on a 'churn' basis. This is a great effort to further open law but it's dangerous for people to rely on this.

Source: I'm a software engineer and a qualified lawyer