I completely agree.

I didn’t include that step, because, well, I take it as a given. Just like powering-on my laptop and logging in. But since it’s part of the overall process, I can see that I should have included it.

So, yes, that happens right before or after, “Ask a good friend to tell me the obvious.”

In this case, I did that. The other team’s leader was very helpful, and probably spent too much time with me for his own good in explaining what’s where. AFAICT, the other time is pure Aces, and I’m going to have to run hard to keep up with them.

I’m in a similar situation at the moment. I was employed by a company who outsourced the project I’m working on originally, and then had to pull it back under their control after some terrible project management (and lack of basic competence) for the sub contractors.

We face a codebase which is riddled with inconsistency and doesn’t really make any use of the best bits of django. There have been several times when this has really screwed me for a couple of hours where I’d be trying to grok what was happening and run into a brick wall…

One of the best was where some js wasn’t loading. I couldn’t even see where it was being put into the tamplate (you’d assume there’d be a tag somewhere wouldn’t you..). What there actually was was something like this:
{% include yahoo.html %}
the contents of which were:
<script src=”{{ YUI_URL }}/path/to.js” …

And this wasn’t even in the head element!! The {{ YUI_URL }} was determined by means of a context processor, depending on whether we were serving it locally or from yahoo.

So at this point I feel that I can’t trust ANY of the app and therefore there’s no point in debugging where I can make any assumptions.

Anyhoo, rant over, life sucks etc etc