I had someone contact me about a project they felt was taking too long. They had hired a contractor to do a Rails app, and wanted a second opinion the code to

I had someone contact me about a project they felt was taking too long. They had hired a contractor to do a Rails app, and wanted a second opinion the code to see what the developer was up to. I got a copy of the code, and it all looked like boilerplate Rails stuff, pretty much by-the-book generated stuff. A first thought was, well, how freakn' long could it take to produce this? But it occurred to me that when you look at code (good or bad), there's often no way to know how the author got there. How much code was scrapped? What ideas were explored? Even when you have the repo history there's still no way to know what might be missing. It's hard to look at code and make any judgments about the developer, since there are often numerous details that informed the decisions made along the way.