Studying a Product by Monitoring Network Traffic
Readings logs is always useful. 🪵
One good way to understand how your product works under the hood is to read the server logs. It's even more useful to read the server logs while using the application in real-time.
Consider starting the project on a local environment. Typically, you would run the backend in one terminal session, and the frontend in another.
Gradually start using the application and observe the API calls that hit the server as you interact with the UI. This will help you trace the code better too because you can search the codebase for the API requests and backtrack them to the UI element / event where they were triggered.
After studying the network logs, you could start reading each endpoint's handler to understand the data models. This will help you fill in the blanks when building context on the internals of a system.
As a general principle, reading logs is always useful. You can learn a lot about a program's behaviours by tracing the logs - you can take it up a level higher by firing up a debugger and putting breakpoints! I'll make a detailed post on using debuggers some other time.
— AdiPat ✨
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