Read through some of the code with the original author. It may seem obvious and it's not always possible, but when you can do this you can cut hours off the time it takes to understand the code and other code that the author wrote.
What you'll get from this that would be more challenging on your own:
What you'll get from this that would be more challenging on your own:
- design tradeoffs
- high level design
- the author's coding patterns