Sometimes I’d really like to stream while getting familiar with this codebase and understanding how it all ties together but I’d probably be laughed out of the room since I’m the laziest fuck and I’m just grepping stuff from error messages and jumping between occurances in the code without having much of an idea of what I’m doing.
Discussion
Then again, this approach helped me to become a somewhat decent systems engineer (you know, DevOps, SRE, that kind of thing) and I’ve debugged hundreds of apps that didn’t work for the weirdest reasons when the developers themselves had no idea what was wrong.
Lazy generalists are undervalued.
That's how I learned pretty much everything I do on a computer, from graphics to audio to coding.
True. I guess I’ve been burned by two clients that I invited into a pairing session and they just came down hard on me for not really understanding the entire code base while suggesting changes to senior developers.