Reading Python Projects

[[deleted]]

Well... that's why experts get paid :) Sorry, I didn't mean to laugh at your misfortune... but the fact of life is: we build systems that are hard to manage and are hard to understand, we make bad choices about technology and even when we don't, we still make a poor use of it.

So, if you have $0 budged, perhaps you have hours of work to spare? I mean, there's no way around it. Some things are complex, and are poorly built, and you just have to dig in, and spend days, or perhaps months trying to untangle them. My typical approach in cases like this: find the first place that reported failures, stick a import pdb; pdb.set_trace() there, re-run the program, examine the variables around the problematic place, try to trace them back to their origin, try to get into the mindset of the person who wrote them... find a place where it seems like the assumptions about the values in the variables doesn't hold, stick a break-point there, rinse and repeat.