How to Explore and Understand a Large Codebase

Abbey Perini taught herself programming at age 27 while working as an admin at an engineering recruitment agency. She has worked extensively with large legacy codebases and taught best practices to developers internationally.

We talk about: - How to hit the ground running with a large legacy codebase - How to get employers to remember you and actually respond to you - How she adapted to her ADHD diagnosis and stays focused and ships code - How knitting and cosplay give her perspective as a dev

Links we discuss: - Abbey's blog: https://abbeyperini.com/ - Robby Russell (OhMyZSH maintainer) interview: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/podcast-oh-my-zsh-creator-and-ceo-robby-russell/ - Leon (100Devs founder) interview: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/playing-the-developer-job- search-game-to-win-in-2025-with-danny-thompson-and-leon-noel-podcast-188/ - AskJan to help you figure out if you need accomodation at work and your options: https://askjan.org/ - Little Old Lady Memory: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2020/02/that-time-when-computer-memory-was.html

Links from the community news section:

1. freeCodeCamp just published a new course taught by legendary Harvard computer science professor Dr. David J. Malan. This comprehensive cybersecurity for beginners course will teach you how to secure accounts, databases, and entire software systems. Dr. Malan also shares tons of practical tips for securing your privacy in an increasingly adversarial world. (8 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-cybersecurity-from-harvard-university/

2. freeCodeCamp also published a guide to passing the Certified Kubernetes Administrator Exam. Beau Carnes teaches this course, which will walk you through key DevOps concepts. You'll start by setting up your K8s practice environment. Then you'll bootstrap a multi-node cluster and your control plane. You'll learn about Helm, High Availability Autoscaling, CoreDNS, and more. (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/prepare-for-the-kubernetes-administrator-certification-and-pass/

3. Learn how to build high-performance mobile apps using Google's open-source Flutter framework. freeCodeCamp uses Flutter for our Android and iPhone apps, and it's way easier than maintaining two separate app codebases. This Flutter handbook will teach you how to efficiently lay out your apps with minimum widget rebuilds. You'll learn state management techniques, asynchronous patterns, and image caching best practices. You'll also learn how to use Isolates and lazy loading to make your apps really snappy. (full length handbook): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-build-scalable-and-performant-flutter-applications-a-handbook-for-devs/

4. Learn Serverless Architecture using C# .NET and Azure cloud. This jam-packed course will teach you common microservice patterns, Onion Architecture, IoT functions, and more. (5 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/serverless-and-microservices-with-c-and-azure/

5. If you want to listen to lofi music in the background while you work with lower data consumption (64kbps or 128kbps) than YouTube and no ads, freeCodeCamp has got your covered: https://coderadio.freecodecamp.org

The song of the week is Marvin Gaye's "A Funky Space Reincarnation" released on New Year's Day 1978. Tons of funky solos, a laid back drum groove, and Marvin doing some James Brown-style vocal punctuations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk8-EXnFSjw

Buy a freeCodeCamp shirt: https://shop.freecodecamp.org

The freeCodeCamp community is working hard on so many improvements to our core curriculum. You should support our charity's mission, and by extension the entire open source ecosystem that relies on our learning resources: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate