code-complexity VS code-maat

In my years as a software engineer, I have probably looked at hundreds of codebases. Too many to count. I struggled a lot with understanding where the relevant code is most of the time. Normally, asking for help what I should look for and guidance in tickets will bring me forward. Slowly and surely I will understand what the code is doing. And you will too. Some people are better at this and some people will be slow. No shame. Most code is complex. But I found a simple tool that will make it easier for you. It is called code-complexity and you can use it as the following code snippet shows:

Get a copy of "Your code as a crime scene", then check out two GitHub repos

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

https://github.com/smontanari/code-forensics

He also wrote Your Code as a Crime Scene and authored the open source tool, Code Maat. I've found both extremely useful in my current job where I took over a code base with immense technical debt.

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

It's not as neat as that unfortunately. You use this to extract different data from the version control history: https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat

Then visualize it however. I have some d3 scripts that came with the book that I've modified and you can track down somewhere on github I'm pretty sure. I mostly use those for demoing it to devs unfamiliar with the techniques though, since it looks cool and is immediately obvious what it's for.

For serious use I dump it into sqlite and use a mix of different scripts and techniques to figure it out. It's been kind of a language playground for me over the years so is in a lot of different languages and is "learning code" in most of them. Cleaning them up and sharing is one of those "maybe some day" things though.

After searching a bit more, it seems like https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat is a great tool

The tool code-complexity is closely coupled to JavaScript and TypeScript-based codebases. For other languages like Java, C#, Python, or PHP there are other tools, but one tool that is generic and works for most of the codebases is code-maat. It is a tool created by the author of the book mentioned in the chapter before.

https://github.com/adamtornhill/code-maat#Usage