Reading code

This talk highlights the importance of practicing code reading as a skill equal to writing. It explores deliberate practice through code reading sessions, techniques for navigating unfamiliar codebases, and how improving code comprehension leads to writing more readable, maintainable code.

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Marit van DijkJetBrains

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Friday, June 19, 13:35-14:25

Room 1

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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.

reading

practice

code

understanding

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Marit van Dijk

JetBrains

Netherlands

Marit van Dijk is a Java Champion and Developer Advocate at JetBrains with over 20 years of software development experience. She’s passionate about building great software with great people, and making developers’ lives easier.
Marit regularly presents at international conferences and shares her expertise through webinars, podcasts, blog posts, videos, and tutorials. She’s also a contributor to the book “97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know” (O’Reilly Media).