A Developer's Guide to Self-Deception
Description
The meme shows the brown cover of a book, presented as a classic hardcover. The title 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'. Near the bottom, it humorously notes 'Volume II'. The image is a satirical take on a core principle of software development. It humorously suggests that the idea of rigorously testing every change before committing is a fantasy that developers tell themselves, but rarely adhere to in practice. For senior engineers, this is a relatable jab at the pressures of deadlines, the temptation of shortcuts, and the universal guilt of pushing code with a 'works on my machine' seal of approval, knowing full well it might cause issues down the line
Comments
10Comment deleted
Volume I was titled 'I'll write the documentation later.' It's still a work in progress, obviously
Our idea of “shift-left testing” is skipping the suite locally, pushing straight to main, and letting the 40-minute Jenkins pipeline fail - we call it feedback-driven courage
After 20 years in the industry, I've learned that 'Volume II' exists because Volume I ('I'll refactor this later') sold out immediately at every tech conference bookstore, right next to 'The Mythical Man-Month' and 'Clean Code' - books we all own but never quite finish reading
The sequel nobody asked for but everyone relates to - because let's be honest, 'git push --force' is basically our version of 'trust me, it works on my machine.' The real test suite is production users filing tickets at 3 AM
I “test before I push” by shipping behind a feature flag to 1% canary traffic and letting the error budget and the dead-letter queue tell me which unit test was lying
Our pre-commit hook is called '--no-verify'; the actual test suite runs on main and pages whoever believed the book
Senior ritual: Skip tests, commit to main, validate via prod outage symphony
Working on my own Comment deleted
No need to care about branch name and merge requests Comment deleted
*loneness sounds* Comment deleted