Digging into the Matrix - Practicing Code Archaeology

Learn to understand and work with code written by others through psychological insights and archaeological techniques in this 55-minute conference talk from NDC Oslo 2025. Discover why most code you encounter wasn't written by you and how dismissing or deleting unfamiliar code can be a costly mistake. Explore the human context behind code decisions by understanding the reasons, culture, and values that influenced the original developers. Master psychological tools to reduce cognitive effort when reading others' code and apply archaeological methods within your development environment to uncover the real stories behind the codebase. Develop essential skills for examining legacy systems with both technical proficiency and human compassion, enabling you to change and improve software by first understanding what it already accomplishes and learning from the experiences of previous developers.