A Developer's Book of Hilarious Self-Deceptions
Description
The image displays the cover of a fictional book. The book has a plain, brownish-orange cover with black text. The top and spine of the book, visible at the top edge, have a classic black and white striped pattern. The title on the cover reads, 'I properly test my changes and ensure they work before I commit and push', followed by the subtitle, 'And Other Hilarious Jokes You Can Tell Yourself'. At the very bottom, in smaller text, it says 'Volume II'. This meme format uses a fake book cover to satirize common self-deceptions or falsehoods within a specific community. In this case, it targets the software development practice of claiming to test code thoroughly before integrating it, humorously presenting this ideal as a complete fantasy. It resonates with developers who have, under pressure or out of habit, pushed code with minimal testing, only to find bugs later
Comments
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'I tested it locally' is the software equivalent of 'the check is in the mail.' Both are technically true at some point, but offer zero guarantees about the outcome
Volume II was sponsored by every engineer who swore “the pre-commit hook ran fine on my laptop” - CI disagreed, PagerDuty concurred, and now we’re out of shelf space
The real test coverage is the number of times you've had to explain to the CEO why the hotfix deployment at 3 AM was actually a feature rollback disguised as a "performance optimization."
The real joke is that this is Volume II - implying we've already published an entire first volume of lies we tell ourselves about our development practices. At least we're consistent in our inconsistency. The book probably sits right next to 'I Always Write Documentation First' and 'My Code Is Self-Explanatory' on the fiction shelf
Volume I: 'It works on my machine.' The prequel that launched a thousand rollbacks
I “properly test” before pushing - deploy to canary behind a feature flag and watch Grafana; if PagerDuty stays asleep, the suite passed
Truly agile: bypass pre-commit hooks with --no-verify, push to main, and use a seven-figure CI to discover what ‘works on my machine’ means in a multi-region, feature‑flagged monorepo