A Day in the Life of a Developer: Debugging IE7 JavaScript Issues

For anyone curious about where programmers spend their time, this log provides insight into a typical day of debugging, communication, and problem‑solving. The author recorded activities to evaluate productivity and reflect on the value of the work.

At the start, a set of ten JavaScript lines containing a bug is presented; locating these lines among a large codebase is the main challenge.

A quiet day is occasionally interrupted by three people before 11:30, requiring voice or text communication that is logged to maintain focus.

09:50 – Received an email about potentially problematic code and noted unresolved parts.

10:10 – Continued downloading a 4 GB IE7 virtual machine.

10:15 – While the download ran, applied for a TestingBot account.

10:20 – Discussed a new feature with a developer via Skype.

10:21 – Assisted a designer who had not correctly uploaded images, set up folders for automatic issue reporting, and recorded every error encountered.

10:22 – Paused the IE7 download to maintain bandwidth for a Skype call.

10:45 – Completed the Skype conversation.

10:50 – Dealt with 250 bounced error emails, continued the IE7 download, and manually refreshed missing images for designers.

10:55 – Tested IE7 in the browser, examined error logs, and identified error causes.

11:00 – Found a new error caused by a developer; reminded a designer about missing images and created a support ticket.

11:11 – Returned to the IE7 error and located its cause.

11:16 – Downloaded the IE7 error log file.

11:21 – Extracted 50 JavaScript errors from the log and attempted to reduce them.

11:23 – Discovered that errors originated at the start of the log, not recent entries, and reordered logs to find more.

11:26 – Reviewed previously recorded errors only.

11:30 – First error: failure to load Google analytics, blamed on Baidu.

11:31 – Fixed the next error during development.

11:32 – Encountered a Firefox‑on‑Mac issue and opened a support ticket.

11:35 – Remaining 50 errors traced to the same Mac system.

11:37 – Modified search logic from “AND” to “OR” without effect.

11:42 – Received an email about missing fonts and notified the designer.

11:43 – Restarted the search after cancellation.

11:45 – Designer confirmed that missing files were resolved.

11:46 – Logged a new IE7 error in the released product.

11:50 – Used textingbot.com to view IE7 errors, concluding IE7 is obsolete due to limited debugging information.

11:52 – Noted missing lines in the source view, suspecting whitespace interference.

11:57 – Observed JavaScript handling mobile display; attempted to comment out problematic code on the test server.

12:04 – Could not edit directly because the test server required a password and was blocked by a web spider.

12:06 – Discovered the test server had crashed.

12:08 – Restarted IE7 testing; no JavaScript errors appeared.

12:09 – Removed suspect code comments; errors reappeared, prompting further narrowing.

12:10 – Server became unresponsive; after restarting and logging in, identified the final ten lines as the culprit, commented them out, and added alerts, causing IE7 to crash again.

12:26 – After several attempts, restarted the IE7 test server and identified a script that crashed IE7 and could affect other browsers.

12:30 – Fixed the bug in the source code and continued addressing other IE7 issues.

12:34 – Recognized the need to inform the development team about such hidden scripts, which could run anywhere.

12:45 – Completed the bug fix.

The bugs described were all caused by a stray comma in an initialization statement.

It appears someone copied and pasted the problematic code, which later resurfaced elsewhere.

Author: Ryan O'Neill (translated by 伯乐在线 - yuliu)

Link: http://blog.jobbole.com/63770/

Press and hold the QR code to open in a browser

Download the online course app instantly

Supports Android and iOS

Qunar’s latest popular video courses are all here!