Allow me to be bold with this one, but today I ran again into another one of those environment set up issues that make you question your sanity. No need to get into the details, but ever since the beginning of my career, which has involved quite a bit of J2EE development, one of the things that have amazed me is the ramp up time it took to get started on a project. I am not talking about merely perusing through the code, trying to understand the architecture, get a feel for what’s going on, but simply checking out a project from repository, into Eclipse, and being able to run it on my localhost. “What about the documentation?” I hear you say, you smug devil,  and I smile with full teeth at your foolish smugness. Documentation? Who has time for “Documentation”. “Documentation” means one eager programmer like you was kind enough to flesh out the major steps that should get you to where you need, but in development: THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS…

Why is it that nothing ever works as expected?(Hint: Because we need enjoy the gift of debugging to become expert debuggers)  “Copy the so and so .jar to the WEB-INF folder, change this line in web.xml and you are good to go!” said the instructions, yet it’s one week later and Tomcat still won’t start.   I remember on one of the J2EE projects that i worked on, which was an offshoot of an existing project with a 50+ pages outdated development environment set up document, it took me close to two months to get an environment going. I followed the steps, but with each one a pitfall, a bug, that I had to extract a solution for from the minds of not-always-willing-to-share previous developers. It was so obvious in their minds, but not written in the documentation:

“Oh yeah, we had to change this because this and this happened, this is what you need to do…” Thanks, that could have saved me two days!

“Oh that piece of code, unless you are working on this and that you won’t need that!” Thanks, I just spent the last three days trying to get it to work.

Bottom line is that we as developers have to do a better job at documenting what we do (I hope the developers that came upon my documentation agree), and that for the sake of other developers, and not assume that a) it is not such a big deal or b) others will be able to fill in the gaps. I thought J2EE development environments were the worst but I’ve had my share of mishaps in LAMP environments as well.  I am curious, though, as I always assumed that .Net programmers must be somewhat free of those problems being that the word was MS did a good job of providing a polished development environment,  is the grass greener on the other side? Is it an open source software issue? I am interested in hearing about your experience with how easy (or not) it is to become productive within your chosen programming language and associated development environment.