It's what you get for being lazy (non judging here, I'm guilty of it too) and not naming your variables accordingly. When you write the code you probably know what ndi, q, p, lnk, etc. are supposed to mean. But then you leave the code for some time and when you return you are lost. Just write out variable and function names so that your code reads like english - programming Obj-C for some time really helped me there :)

And with pointer-heavy code I tend to create aliases for offsets so I don't have to write out things like *(q->lnk+!dec) every time I reference that specific address.

Yes, maybe it will cost me wizard points with colleagues because they start to understand my code but my sanity is it worth to me ;)

(Also trailing/leading underscores are the devil!)