The value of a second pair of eyes

A long time a go in an office far far away I had to sit for four hours a day watching someone else write code.  It was slow, it was boring, and it drove me nuts.  It was pair programming and in retrospect I've noticed that it did make both of us better programmers and the code itself better.  I often get little reminders of one of the important reasons for pair programming.

A second set of eyes

This weeks example, I received an IRC message asking if I could help out with a CSS issue.  I'm not a "CSS guy" I'm more a "CSS thief" but I was game.  So, we looked over his Django template and a solution eventually presented itself.  I mocked it up, uploaded a patch and he merged it in.  Great!  Now he states if he could only figure out one other little issue.  

I couldn't help myself, I was in programming mode.  I asked "what was wrong?"  A ManyToMany object wasn't printing out on his page and had him stumped.  It stumped me to, I barely know Django and after going through all the documentation everything looked correct.  I threw in a "{{ forloop.counter }}" and nothing showed up.  Found sites that were doing exactly what he was trying to do and they matched.  Finally I saw he had one little element "related_name" in the foriegnkey attribute.  I had read about it, and it wasn't necessary so I thought "why not try removing it and seeing what happens."  His code worked.  Code he and then I had poured over for hours that was technically correct and one little "un-necessary" element was the cause.