How Do You Handle Looking at Large Codebases?

Question

I'm working on a few big projects, I'm experiencing a bit of uncertainty and forgetting what I did 300 lines back. How do you handle this type of situations where you need to read your own code or others when it comes to large ones?

Leftium · Accepted Answer

Divide your project into independent modules:
- So after you build a module, you only have to remember the interface to the module: what does it input? What does it output? You can forget about the implementation details.
- If you need to later fix a problem in that module, you only need to remember the interface to other modules it interacts with.
- Good self-documenting names and comments will help.
- It's like when you use 3rd party modules: you just need to understand the API it exposes, not the underlying implementation details.