The best way to familiarize yourself with an inherited codebase

Question

Stacker Nobody asked about the most shocking thing new programmers find as they enter the field.

Very high on the list, is the impact of inheriting a codebase with which

Answer 1

All really good answers here. Just wanted to add few more things:

One can pair architectural understanding with flash cards and re-visiting those can solidify understanding. I find questions such as "Which part of code does X functionality ?", where X could be a useful functionality in your code base.

I also like to open a buffer in emacs and start re-writing some parts of the code base that I want to familiarize myself with and add my own comments etc.