Hey hey hey,

Mads here with another edition of the Top 3 in Tech newsletter, filled with amazing web dev goodies. Let's get into it with today's essay:

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1. Reading code

When you work as a developer, you’re going to be spending a lot of time reading code. You will probably spend more time reading code than actually writing it - that's why learning how to properly read code is a key skill to master. It’s not always the most fun, but it’s necessary and can be learned quite easily with practice.

Reading code is about your understanding of what a particular piece of code is doing. There’s several different scenarios where this proves useful:

• Understanding code from a tutorial so you can modify it to your needs.
• Trying to familiarize yourself with a new codebase at work or in open source.
• Debugging 3rd party code from a dependency in your project
• Understanding what on Earth is going on in the code you wrote last night, or last week, or 6 months ago.

The last one will probably be familiar to you. Looking back at older projects, it’s impossible to remember how the code was working. Knowing how to effectively read code will help you understand what the code is meant to do, and it’ll be easier for you to modify it or fix bugs in the future.

So, here's 3 tips for getting better at reading code:

1. Try to understand what the author was going for. What is this piece of code trying to accomplish? Why? Try to uncover the reason it was written this way.
2. Read it line by line. If you get to a part that exists in another file, follow the trail. Make sure you understand what each part of the code is supposed to be doing. Trace every function call.
3. Do it often. Make it a habit to properly read through 3rd party code that you use in your project. You don’t need to read every single library, but if you copy a solution from StackOverflow, read it thoroughly to understand how and why it works. Add a few comments if you’re unclear about something. That’ll make it so much easier if you need to revisit the code later.

If you can apply these simple habits, you'll get MUCH better at reading code - and by reading lots of code and understanding it, you'll also begin to understand what makes code "good" or "bad" based on how readable it is. Which will automatically make you better at writing code. Sounds like a win/win to me!

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2. GitHub Copilot

Some months ago I included GitHub Copilot in the newsletter, right around when it got announced initially. But in case you missed it, the basic idea is simple: Copilot offers suggestions to automatically complete parts of your code based on what it thinks you are trying to do.

Well, I had my doubts of how useful this could actually be in practice. To be honest, I thought it was mostly a gimmick that would only work for very specific usecases.

Boy was I wrong.

I got invited to the technical preview last week and have been playing around with Copilot - and it's insane. The ease at which it can write out entire functions for you, purely based on the function name or even a COMMENT, is ridiculous. I seriously think it's gonna be one of my biggest productivity boosters in development, so I definitely recommend checking it out and signing up for the waitlist if you haven't already:

​Learn more and sign up for GitHub Copilot​

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3. Hydrogen

The last pick for this week is a new JavaScript framework. And yes, I know what you're thinking:

Do we really need another one???

Well, Hydrogen is different. It's based entirely on React, and created by the fine folk at Shopify. It's designed to provide a modern front-end stack to use with Shopify to create ecommerce stores, and it looks very promising. By leveraging cool new tools like Vite, React Server components and GraphQL, they've truly modernized the experience when creating Shopify themes, and I'm excited for where it goes next. It's not quite production ready, but I'm definitely gonna be testing it out ASAP.

​Learn more on the official landing page or check out this 5 minute breakdown by Fireship:

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Thanks for reading! I would really appreciate if you would share the newsletter with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, by email or copy/paste the link mads.fyi/top3 on other platforms. It really helps to keep me motivated and let the newsletter grow ✌

Until next time,

Mads Brodt