While it might be useful to state it again occasionally, I think people would generally find it strange to have a career writing books--wherein you might only publish ten books in your entire life--without having not just read but carefully studied hundreds of books written by other people. And yet, I feel like most of the software developers I know might technically read code in the sense that they have to to edit it, or to review edits by coworkers, but they have potentially never sat down and simply read through and fully internalized the entirety of even a single codebase that they weren't somehow involved with developing... and they think that is "normal".
I've found for me what helps me do such things is actually writing, but writing about what I read. It forces me to not gloss over or skip anything. Like a form of recital. "This function takes a pointer called blah and uses it to blah blah...". I'll go line by line basically rewriting the program in plain English. Especially helpful for languages I'm not that familiar with.
As someone mostly self taught that's how I've always done it until I do it enough I can do it in my head.
While it might be useful to state it again occasionally, I think people would generally find it strange to have a career writing books--wherein you might only publish ten books in your entire life--without having not just read but carefully studied hundreds of books written by other people. And yet, I feel like most of the software developers I know might technically read code in the sense that they have to to edit it, or to review edits by coworkers, but they have potentially never sat down and simply read through and fully internalized the entirety of even a single codebase that they weren't somehow involved with developing... and they think that is "normal".
I've found for me what helps me do such things is actually writing, but writing about what I read. It forces me to not gloss over or skip anything. Like a form of recital. "This function takes a pointer called blah and uses it to blah blah...". I'll go line by line basically rewriting the program in plain English. Especially helpful for languages I'm not that familiar with.
As someone mostly self taught that's how I've always done it until I do it enough I can do it in my head.