Hey there,
I have been a hobbyist programmer for quite some years and have a few smaller projects under my belt: mostly smaller GUI applications that have a few classes at maximum, make use of one or two external libraries and are very thoroughly documented and commented.
Since I love the free software movement and philosophy, I wanted to start contributing to projects I like and help them out.
The thing is, the jump from “hobbyist” to “being able to understand super-efficient compact established repos”… seems to be very hard?
Like, looking into some of these projects, I see dozens upon dozens of classes, header files, with most of them being totally oblique to me. They use syntactic constructs I cannot decipher very well because they have been optimized to irrecognizability, sometimes I cannot even find the starting point of a program properly. The code bases are decades old, use half the obscure compiler and language features, and the maintainers seem to be intimately familiar with everything to the point where I don’t even know what’s what or where to start. My projects were usually like four source files or so, not massive repositories with hundreds of scattered files, external configurations, edge cases, factories of factories, and so on.
If I want to change a simple thing like a placement of a button or - god knows! - introduce a new feature, I would not even remotely know where to start.
Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?
Im a programmer for work and honestly feel the same. Everyone says I’m doing a good job but I feel like it takes me forever to understand a new code base. I can’t just read a program and understand it. I need to copy and paste bits and try copy a feature to get my head around it. Like if there’s a button on the GUI then I follow it right the way through creating my own button. But I don’t know if there’s a better way to learn than that
When I come across pieces of code I don’t understand just by reading them I like to run them through ChatGPT and ask it what it does.
It does a really good job at explaining them and you can even ask follow up questions and it will go into more detail.
It’s essentially StackOverflow but nobody calls you an idiot for asking stupid questions.
I would be careful with this advice. If you are asking AI for an explanation of code, you may not have the experience to differentiate when it is correct and confidently incorrect.
Also be wary about sharing confidential code. At work I don’t use ChatGPT unless it’s for extremely general questions.
The good thing about code is that explanations can easily be followed up with a quick search in the documentation once you know the terms to look it up.
But you are correct, as with everything related to ChatGPT, don’t let it bullshit you.