Reading your own code shouldn’t feel hard. So why does it feel like someone else wrote it? There’s a strange moment every developer experiences. You open code you wrote a few weeks ago… and it feels completely unfamiliar. The logic looks confusing. The structure feels off. And you start questioning every decision. Then it hits you. You wrote this. It’s frustrating, but also revealing. Because it shows how much you’ve changed. What once made perfect sense now feels unnecessarily complicated. That’s growth. But it also highlights something important: Code isn’t just for the machine. It’s for your future self. If you can’t understand it later, it’s going to slow you down more than any bug. Writing code is one skill. Reading your own code is another. #programming #developers #codinglife #softwareengineering #debugging #cleancode #devlife
And somehow, the more “clever” the code felt while writing, the worse it is to read later.
Not always it is growth, usually it is rush. You just rushed first option, than after some time you created another much better as you cannot just forget what you have done. Than you forget and it is not always growth, you just picked first option and it appears that it wasn't perfect. Next time you will have same problem. This is why I always create something fast and next day I review it and update. After 3-4 itterations even after 1 year I see sense in each symbol, with typos ofcourse.
Well, use comments in your code.Something that atleast you can understand
Be honest, how often do you struggle to understand code you wrote yourself?