Reading Code - Marit van Dijk - NDC London 2025

This talk was recorded at NDC London in London, England. #ndclondon #ndcconferences #developer #softwaredeveloper Attend the next NDC conference near you: https://ndcconferences.com https://ndclondon.com/ Subscribe to our YouTube channel and learn every day: / @NDC Follow our Social Media! https://www.facebook.com/ndcconferences https://twitter.com/NDC_Conferences https://www.instagram.com/ndc_conferences/ #workskills #softskills #ai #code As developers, we spend a lot of time learning to write code, but very little time learning to read code. Meanwhile, we spend more time reading code than actually writing it. Especially in the age of AI assisted coding, as it becomes easier to produce more code faster, being able to quickly evaluate code will become even more important. Shouldn’t we be spending more time and effort improving our code reading skills? Deliberate practice can help us get better at reading code. Learning how to better read and understand code, can in turn teach us what makes code readable and might even help us to write code that is easier to read. In this talk we will discuss the benefits of deliberately practicing reading code in a code reading club without an IDE, as well as strategies to navigate a new codebase and read unfamiliar code using the IDE. We'll also look at how AI Assistant can help us to understand existing code, and why it is important for us to be able to evaluate AI generated code.