Programming

7 Ways GitLens Helps Me Understand Code Faster

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Towards AI
6 min readOct 12, 2021

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Introduction

In this article, I will share 7 scenarios in which GitLens has helped me save a lot of time reading and understanding code.

We will use the rasa repository as the example codebase to illustrate the scenarios.

Scenarios

The scenarios we will cover are:

  1. Figuring out who wrote a specific line of code
  2. Figuring out what other changes were made
  3. Figuring out how a feature works
  4. Figuring out what has changed since our last commit
  5. Figuring out what are the changes in a news release
  6. Figuring out the recent changes in a specific part of a codebase
  7. Figuring out when a pull request was released

Scenario 1: Who Wrote That Line?

According to rasa’s documentation at the time of writing, the socketio channel supports JWT authentication but the REST channel does not.

Suppose we are interested in implementing JWT authentication for the REST channel. A good first step is to reach out to the person who implemented it for the socketio channel to ask for advice. How…

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