Spent all this time learning to write code, and my first month has been almost entirely reading a codebase I don't understand — jumping through ten files to trace one function. Is there a real skill to getting fast at this, or is it just reps? Feels like a muscle nobody trains you for in any course.
Nobody tells you this in tutorials where you write everything from scratch. Reading code fast is a genuine, trainable skill — I started reading one random file from our codebase a day just to get fluent. Huge difference within a month.
It's absolutely trainable and reps are most of it, but a couple things sped it up for me: run the code with breakpoints instead of reading it statically, and start from the entry point of ONE feature rather than trying to understand the whole thing at once. Nobody holds the full codebase in their head — even the seniors. They're just fast at tracing.
