On knowing enough to read the code

I really agree with Sean Goedecke’s piece on how to read code. He describes following a particular path through a program, seeing which functions call each other and how the data moves, then going back into the detail once he understands the shape of it. It’s a big reason why I still think design engineers need to understand coding fundamentals, especially with how much code we can now generate with AI. When you’re working on an interface, you’re making decisions about behaviour all the time. Take a search field. Someone types, a request goes out, results come back. Then they type something else whilst the first request is still running. If the older response arrives last and replaces the newer results, the interface is now showing the wrong thing. To understand why, you need to follow that interaction through the code: what triggers the request, where the result is stored, and what decides whether it should still appear. Knowing about functions, state, and asynchronous work gives you…