Comment by zahlman

> Do you just remember every type and field in a codebase?

I remember the functions that are relevant in the current context, yeah. I don't design things that have a lot of properties in the first place; and I'm concerned with what objects can do, not with their types (and I use Python, which empowers me to write this way).

> What does your flow look like?

Generally I keep a terminal open as I write in an editor window; most of the time it's cd'd to the project root. (Hmm, maybe I should be using `pushd` and `popd` more....)

At about 200 lines of code in a file or 10 lines in a function, I start looking for ways to split it up or organize things better. At double those values I start panicking about it.

Every identifier name is an opportunity to explain something crucial about the process.

I rarely use inheritance any more, let alone multiple inheritance. Jack Diederich's "Stop Writing Classes" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0 - a clickbait name, but you know how it goes) is part of my mantra; `functools.partial` is very often a better tool for the job.

> What do you do if you need to look up the definition/implementation of some function which is in some other file?

I can tell where it is because the import statement tells me the package name, and I have a single file hierarchy for code in my project. But most of the time I can just trust myself that it works the way I expect it to, because I wrote it, and I followed conventions when I wrote it, and I made sure it fundamentally doesn't do very much or have a complex signature. (If it operates on complex data, I build that up - step by step - rather than passing all the pieces as separate arguments.)

If it's someone else's code, generally I'm going to look up the documentation anyway, not the code. If for some reason I have to figure out where the code is, I can do it easily enough, because I know where third-party libraries are relative to `sys.executable`, and I know where that is because I use venvs in a standard and predictable way. (Oh, but I could probably improve this with a one-liner Bash function, brb....)

But I do also have the option of checking things at the REPL. Python does a lot to help programmers feel like they don't need an IDE. (Avoiding boilerplate is also huge here.)