Daily Source Reading - Introduction

I can't remember where I saw the original post, I will have to dig it up at some point. The idea was this: grab a random source file (at best from some larger project) and read it. Truly try to understand it. Take notes.

(Update: I found the article)

One could call it code review practice. Or just trying to learn a new system.

My current focus and interest is in the BSD systems, specifically FreeBSD and OpenBSD. But these are massive systems, not something that one can just quickly glance over and understand (well, easier than trying to grok Linux I guess).

I will start with the base system tools, e.g. echo, ls and the likes. It's been a while since I have done some lower level tinkering with good ol' plain C.

Later I plan to move on to some more system internals and take a look at syscalls, memory management and so forth.

And where applicable, it might be interesting to compare how both projects approach the problem space and their solutions to it.

However, daily might be the wrong word here. Sometimes it's difficult to set an hour or more aside to read through code and take notes. Sometimes the piece of code might require some longer reading. But "regular source reading" doesn't sound as enticing or motivational, does it? Neither does "source reading at random intervals". I will call it "daily" so I at least will try to foster this habit.

To start, the next blog post will be about … drum roll … echo. One would think that echo cannot be that exciting to read, but it will already show very different approaches by both projects.