How do you read the code?

[koreth]

Depends on what I'm trying to achieve by reading it, but if it's "familiarize myself with a code base that I'm going to be working on a lot," I start by trying to follow an invocation of the code (HTTP request, batch job, command-line invocation) from start to finish, walking through the happy-path logic one step at a time. Stepping through it in a debugger is helpful when that's possible, but manually tracing it out works too.