ARCHITECTURE.md
published on 2024/02/25
I have experience with both contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. One of the lessons I’ve learned is that the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code. This difference might be hard to perceive if you’ve been working with the project for a while. If I am new to a code base, I read each file as a sequence of logical chunks specified in some pseudo-random order. If I’ve made significant contributions before, the perception is quite different. I have a mental map of the code in my head, so I no longer read sequentially. Instead, I just jump to where the thing should be, and, if it is not there, I move it. One’s mental map is the source of truth.
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