From time to time you might find yourself having to take over somebody elses work. Usually, this is not a good sign. Was it an issue communicating with the client? Was there a problem with budget? Perhaps the developer was a friend and got in over their head?
There isn't anything inherently troublesome about such projects. In fact, it can be an opportunity to wow a new client and start a great working relationship.
At the very least, as a developer, it should make you a little wary of strange quirks. Recently, I ran into an issue when the client requested that a signup form be placed on top of a large banner image.
Strangely, the email address input box would not focus no matter how many times I clicked. It didn't matter if I removed all of the input attributes. Yet, a nearby submit button worked without issue.
After I went through all manner of debugging attempts, I realized that the input box would work when I placed the form outside of the banner image. This led me to quickly discover that a parent class connected to the banner image caption class set pointer-events to none. Undoing this immediately fixed the issue.
Perhaps the original developer had a need to disable this. Maybe it was an oversight. You can choose the client, but you can't choose the bugs.
