Strict unit-test vows on day one, laughter when prod crashes two years later
Description
Two-panel cartoon. Left panel is headed "FIRST month" in bold black letters. A wide-eyed developer with purple hair stands by a kitchen counter, brandishing a dish sponge while pointing at a printed spec beside a microwave. Her speech bubble says, "EVERYTHING THAT TOUCHES THE project NEEDS TO BE unit tested AND reviewed," with the words "unit tested" and "reviewed" underlined in red for emphasis. Right panel is headed "2 years after release." A bearded developer sits on a beige couch holding a game controller; a crawling baby has face-planted on the rug. He says, "LOOK, SHE’S crashed in production." The purple-haired developer, now casually gaming on a handheld console and clicking a button (“CLICK”), replies, "HAHA, FUNNY." The meme contrasts early-project zeal for 100% unit tests and rigorous code reviews with later indifference to crashes in production, highlighting quality decay and technical debt familiar to seasoned engineers
Comments
12Comment deleted
Kickoff: “100 % unit-test coverage or it doesn’t merge.” Year 2: “If prod face-plants but the PagerDuty baby monitor stays quiet, we’re still within SLO.”
The real unit test is whether your pager stays quiet at 3am, and the only code review that matters is the post-mortem where everyone pretends they saw it coming but nobody wants to refactor the monolith that's keeping the lights on
Ah yes, the classic trajectory: from 'we need 100% test coverage and mandatory peer reviews' to 'production's down again? Just restart the pod and grab another beer.' Two years is actually impressive - most teams hit the 'laugh at production fires' stage by sprint 12. The real kicker? That microwave in panel one probably has better uptime than their deployment pipeline now, and unlike their CI/CD, it still runs its self-tests before every operation
Month 1: “Write tests for anything you touch.” Year 2: “Write postmortems for anything that touches production” - we quietly migrated from TDD to PDD: Postmortem-Driven Development
Initial QA rigor: every commit a code review gauntlet. Prod maturity: 'Crashed again? That's our battle-tested feature flag logic.'
We started with 95% unit-test coverage; two years later we optimize for 95th percentile MTTR - same number of digits, very different religion
unit tests are such a hustle Comment deleted
especially on web projects like Django or Flask Comment deleted
The first kid is basically alpha test Comment deleted
me Comment deleted
they are now banned Comment deleted
It is more about machine learning that makes stupidity in the beginning of its work Comment deleted