Speaker: Jonathan Boccara

Audience level: Beginner | Intermediate | Advanced

One of the reasons why a lot of us work in C++ is because there is a huge amount of existing projects written in C++.

But existing code can be hard to understand.

In this presentation, you will learn how to make sense of code quickly, from the general big picture of the codebase all the way down to the little details of the code of a complex class.

The ten rules covered in this session will teach you to:

- start reading code from the end
- identify the parts of code that carry the most information
- locate the code of any feature visible in the application
- and many more!

Code reading techniques usually come with years and years of experience. This presentation will teach some of them to you right now, supported by numerous code examples.

There is a wealth of talks about how to write C++ code using the latest features of the language, but there are very few talks about reading existing code. In particular the everyday code that people have in their codebases. And as the saying goes, code is read much more often than it is written.

This presentation aims at filling this need in a practical way, by exposing 10 techniques that conferences attendees can use on an everyday basis to understand quickly the code they get to work on, as soon as they go back to the office after the conference.