Hello everyone!
On Tuesday, June 10th 2025, we were honored to host Mike Shah
The topic was “Understanding large and unfamiliar codebases“. A very interesting talk discussing and demonstrating multiple tools and techniques when working with large, unfamiliar code.
The meeting page can be found here
The recording can be found here:
Abstract of the talk: It’s your first day on the job as a new employee. You set up your workstation and then download a repository of over 1,000,000 lines of code. Even more intimidating, the code has been around for 20 years and has parts of it in legacy C++ and also using tentative C++ 26 features from various libraries. You feel overwhelmed! Don’t fret however! In this talk, I provide you a collection of tools to help software engineers of all levels understand what is going on in large unfamiliar codebases. The audience will leave this talk with a few simple and advanced tricks for navigating large and complicated codebases.
Bio: Mike Shah is currently a teaching faculty at Yale University with primary teaching interests in computer systems, computer graphics, and game engines. Mike’s research interests are related to performance engineering (dynamic analysis), software visualization, and computer graphics. Along with teaching and research work, Mike juggles occasional consulting work as a 3D Senior Graphics Engineer in C++ and producing programming content at his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@MikeShah
Highlight of the discussion points:
- How to approach a new code base, the challenges.
- Conway’s low
- Using debugger, reverse debugging like Undo, RR.
- Tools like valgrind, callgrind, cloc and more …
- Demonstrating the techniques using OpenTTD, approaching open source code and getting familiar with the codebase.
Check out the recording for more details!
Thank you JetBrains for sponsoring the group!
Thanks for reading and watching the recording!
Kobi