A movie scene

Anybody who has watched movies about software development knows that reality is much different. None of us work with huge screens on the wall, and debugging is a lot of unexciting detective work.

Today, we were doing some remote debugging over live meeting in a conference room, trying to figure out why an interaction between a website and a web service wasn’t working correctly. We worked through some backend verification, which is as exciting as writing and executing ad-hoc SQL queries always is (not very). Then we moved on to running Fiddler, where we started looking at requests. The URL was pretty complicated and we were verifying all the items in it when I noticed that there was a problem with the base part of the URL. I couldn’t figure out any easy way to tell people what it was because the screen was busy, so I jumped up and pointed at the spot on the giant projected desktop and exclaimed “that’s the problem!”.

And it was, and I got to do a happy dance. But the soundtrack was a bit lacking.