Hi. I am a trainee developer and have been writing .NET applications for about a year now. Most of the work I have done has involved building new applications (mainly web apps) from scratch and I have been given more or less full control over the software design.

This has been a great experience however, as a trainee developer my confidence about whether the approaches I have taken are the best is minimal. Ideally I would love to collaborate with more experienced developers (I find this the best was I learn) however in the company I work for developers tend to work in isolation (a great shame for me).

Recently I decided that a good way to learn more about how experienced developers approach their design might be to explore some open source projects. I found myself a little overwhelmed by the projects I looked at. With my level of experience it was hard to understand the body of code I faced.

My question is slight fuzzy one. How do developers approach the task of understanding a new medium to large scale project. I found myself pouring over lots of code and struggling to see the wood for the trees. At any one time I felt that I could understand a small portion of the system but not see how its all fits together. Do others get this same feeling? If so what approaches do you take to understanding the project? Do you have any other advice about how to learn design best practices?

Any advice will be very much appreciated. Thank you.