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I Finally Learned How Senior Engineers Read Code (It’s Not What You Think) | by Dua Asif | Activated Thinker | Medium

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Line by line. Top to bottom. Left to right. Like I was reading a novel. Trying to understand every single function before moving to the next one. Taking notes. Drawing diagrams. Convincing myself that if I just stared hard enough, the architecture would reveal itself. It never did. Then I watched a principal engineer at Google review a pull request. She opened a 2,000-line change. Scrolled through it in maybe forty seconds. Left six comments. All of them were exactly right. The kind of insights that would have taken me three hours to stumble upon. I asked her how she did it. Her answer changed everything….. “I do not read code. I interrogate it.” When you are starting out, everyone tells you the same thing….. read more code. Study open source projects. Go through the Linux kernel. Read the source code of libraries you use. Nobody tells you how. So you do what feels natural. You start at line one. You read every function. You try to hold the entire system in your head at once. You get l

I Finally Learned How Senior Engineers Read Code (It’s Not What You Think) I spent three years reading code the wrong way. Dua Asif 13 min read · Jan 1, 2026 -- Listen Share Press enter or click to view image in full size AI GENERATED Line by line. Top to bottom. Left to right. Like I was reading a novel. Trying to understand every single function before moving to the next one. Taking notes. Drawing diagrams. Convincing myself that if I just stared hard enough, the architecture would reveal itself. It never did. Then I watched a principal engineer at Google review a pull request. She opened a

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