In you developer life you'll use more of other people's code than your own. Your ability to choose and compare open source libraries will be crucial. This isn't easy. You need to balance features, community, documentation, opinion, ... the list goes on. All that will come with experience.
Before any other skills, you need to know how to navigate codebase. Documentation is good, wikis are nice, communities are helpful, but they are all built to support a living codebase. Eight hours into a bug there will be no more helpful documentation or Q/A's that you haven't read, your only hope will to be going into a library's GitHub repo and sifting through the codebase my hand.
At times like these, familiarity with reading through large projects will save your sanity. Firstly because you've (hopefully) chosen a clearly written library, and secondly because you'll finally fix that darned bug!
- It's the only way to know what's really going on. 1. 2.
- To choose libraries
- It's your natural-born right as a developer in the information age.
Here's a few resources, find the one that works for you.
- Code with intent
- Benjycui
- Quora - Huy Duong's answer.
The best resoure of all:
- Your own experience. Read a lot of source code.
- Throw away all of your books and print the Express source code.
Some good libraries to start with:
- simple-average: npm, github
- lodash, my recommendation. It's very well done and you'll need to learn it evetually anyway.
- Hashnode recommendations
- Reddit recommendations
- VS Code Navigation Features
- youtube search. push your favorites or add them to the wiki
- Code Search Engine
CodingHorror. From a certain perspective the source code is irrelevant. This article's main point is that apps aren't about code, they're about user experiences. It say the best way to understand an app or library is to understand the user experiences and try replicating them.
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