Learn to Read the Source, Luke

I love this quote and I couldn’t agree more. Because the source code is the single source of truth. Regardless of what the documentation might say.
So being able to read the source code of a dependency you have in your program, not only gives you access to that truth but might yield some other mayor advantages as well:

• Speed up trouble shooting because of the additional knowledge
• Enhanced debugging by being able to step into the code of the library
• If you find a bug, you can better judge where to fix it (Workaround, upstream, etc.)
• Generally gain more insights into the workings of the library
• Get to know how other developers write their code

Today’s IDEs make accessing the source code easier by downloading it directly if the programming language allows this. But even without IDE support cloning the repository and following the trail of the stack trace file by file is often more worth while than it initially sounds.
But it All depends on whether the source ode is available or not. That’s another good reason to favor open source over closed source .

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