Recently, I had a conversation with a junior developer on my team. Let’s call him Alan. We were talking about a new notification feature that was going to be used to send reminder e-mails to potentially thousands of people if they had forgotten to enter certain data in the last month or so. Alan was confident that the code he’d written was correct. “I’ve tested it well.”, he said…
  • souperk@reddthat.com
    0·
    4 months ago

    Me neither buddy, me neither…

    Falsehoods About Time: … Time always moves forwards.

    I had to learn this the hard way… I was working at a platform that pulled measurements from sensors. The sensors did not declare the timezone for the timestamps of the measurement and the platform broke down twice after daylight saving. The first time there were duplicated records which caused conflicts and the second one we weren’t handling impossible timestamps.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
      0·
      4 months ago

      I had a client whose clock was just a few milliseconds behind the server’s, but due to timezone crap one hour in the past. And the signature was valid for one hour.

      If the network just happened to be too congested, the validation failed. The next request went through just fine. Took us forever to find out.

        • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
          0·
          4 months ago

          Epochs aren’t that simple either.

          First of all, local time can be relevant, so you have to store timezone information somewhere anyway.

          Epochs are also somewhat iffy in regards to leap years or seconds.

          And finally: write me an SQL to retrieve all entries submitted in 2022 using just epochs.

          Timezones are annoying as fuck, don’t get me wrong, but simply ignoring them isn’t a solution either.

  • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
    0·
    4 months ago

    I was a full time test engineer / QA person for a while. My motto quickly became “nothing ever works”.

    Pretty much any ticket behind a static copy change would have some problem or oversight. Sometimes even those would (did you account for very narrow view ports?)

    Good developers would take this feedback gracefully. “Shit, you’re right, I need to account for mobile users.”

    Bad developers would get defensive and upset. “We barely have any mobile users (me: did you check?). Alan already approved so I’m merging. I don’t want to waste time on this”

    • JustBrian7872@feddit.de
      0·
      4 months ago

      As a dev I’ve been on both sides to be honest. Especially when there is pressure to finish the next task. I think it needs good planning to create enough time for these things.

      In the end bad devs will still shut you up about things they are not interested in fixing…