A tally from August indicated that I may need to slog through 280,000 lines of code to get up to speed. I sampled https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/key.cpp and skimmed it in about 5 minutes, putting me at 2600 lines per hour. At that rate, I would need to devote 110 hours to read the entire code base.

With that time investment I could get a fair amount of testing done, so I'm curious if we have a map of the most important areas to study for new developers and automated test writers.

Thanks for your time,