It’s Amazing What Passes for Senior Developer These Days
Today a developer chatted me saying he was having a problem with the secondary Y axis on a graph he was building. I knew there were the problems with VantagePoint prior to the fixes I made, so I asked him if he had the latest versions of the BKit jar and the VantagePoint jar. Both were important for the fix.
He want away for a minute or two and came back saying that he got the latest BKit jar and it seill wasn't fixed. OK... let's make sure you have the most recent VantagePoint jar too - it's important as well (didn't I already say this? Yes, I did.)
He went away for a minute or two and then said it still wasn't working. OK, I asked him to send me the HTML and I'd look into it. I got the page, stripped out all the crud that wasn't necessary (headers, text, Javascript) - got it just down to the applet and it's tags. When I ran it in appletviewer I got this:
Looks good to me. So I sent him back the HTML after I called him over to see the graph, and agree that it was as he thought it should be. OK, it's got to be on his end.
He comes back a few minutes later saying it's still not working. So I walk over to his desk. The jars are the correct version, and appletviewer on this box shows the right graph, so how about changing the codebase on the applet tag and seeing if appletviewer will show the right graph.
Oh... that worked.
"Well..." I said, "it's got to be IE's cache." - which I had mentioned as a possibility a while back, but he dismissed.
A few minutes later I get a chat from him - all is working. Surprise.
My rant is that this is simple debugging that any developer should be capable of doing. This isn't something special to me, or any advanced or elite status... this is simple Debugging 101. Yet it eludes him so completely. I know it's not going to make any difference, but it's stunning just the same. Some days I wish I had the ability of calling a programming foul and penalizing him 15 yards for illegal use of an education. Something like that. Gimminy.