As developers, we spend a lot of time learning to write code, while spending little to no time learning to read code. Meanwhile, we often spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Shouldn’t we be spending at least the same amount of time and effort improving this skill? Deliberate practice can help us get better at reading code. Learning how to better read and understand code, can in turn teach us what makes code readable. This might even help us to write code that is easier to read.
In this talk we will discuss the benefits of deliberately practicing reading code in a code reading club or session without an IDE, as well as common strategies to navigate a new codebase and familiarise ourselves with the code using the IDE.