When I saw freeforums.org offering free forum hosting I got an idea to set up a forum related to this blog. I was planning that forum to have discussions related to working abroad as an IT professional. Well, not too big target group...

That was the first problem. I did not want to spam all around about this forum so I decided to start slowly. However, spammers were fast and because I had one area open for guest postings, my time was consumed by administrative tasks. Cleaning up porn adverts was not that fun so disabled guest posting. This basically made that forum dead as very few registered.

The final nail in the coffin was maintenance work from freeforums.org which reverted my forums state to weeks old. Not very nice, but I did not feel like contacting them as I was already tired with this so I disabled the forum. Anyways, it was nice and free experiment to try out.

This week has been really warm. Every day has been over 35 degrees and most likely 40 is reached couple times. Luckily I work in an air-conditioned office but outside is almost unbearable for me. Luckily next weeks starts with more reasonable temperature forecasts.

One of my favorite blogs has a good set of tips for relocation and job searching. Take a look: The Technobedouin Manual: Job hunting abroad

Sometimes it happens and you find yourself facing a huge amount of legacy code. It is developed by persons who are no longer available for one reason or another. There is practically no useful technical documentation and the business cases have mutated something totally different during the years, bugfixes and change requests.

But now you have the code and the deadline approaches. You should implement some changes to this application. Unfortunately there are no test setup to ensure your changes wont break anything. Actually that is not a problem yet because you do not know how to do the first cut.

What to do...?

Take a notepad and a pencil - maybe several colors. Start exploring the code, run it through debugger, make some experimental changes. Mark everything down as a Mind map . After a while you will start to figure out how things are working and what their relations in the system are. There is software for Mind maps but I prefer pencil and paper.

Are there any other tools are techniques to explore and learn unknown code?

Further reading:
The Art of Maintenance Programming
The Noble Art of Maintenance Programming