Once more unto the breach – Facing Horrible Code Once More
Wonderful quote - horrible feeling if there's nothing to be gained. In this case, there wasn't. I had to once again dig into what I'm now calling Project Hemlock, the project I was given very early on at this job, and once again the lack of any documentation either written or comments in the code makes this a challenge I'd not wish to have.
There's something broken in a part of the Hemlock web app, and I need to fix it, but it's not a simple page - it's got business logic in the Flex client as well as the servlet gathering the data for the Flex client. It's not got a clear layout as to what it's doing or why, so the only way to follow the logic is to read each line of the code, understand what the variables are, why this might be happening, and then infer the function.
This logical single-stepping is very tiresome, and today I leave with very little done - more a point of a little more understanding, but still not enough to know where the problem is, or how to fix it. The only way I'm going to get this figured out is to pull in the original developer tomorrow, and have him tell me what's going on.
It's almost funny, but it's not. It's sad.