A colleague of mine works on a pretty important feature. He uses a seperate git-branch for this, so that his changes can be reviewed and thoroughly tested before being merged into the app.
While working on that feature, he fixed some easy-to-fix, but important bugs on this exact branch. In the end, he got stuck due to another reason.
As some customers were waiting for these bug fixes, we wanted to release a new version. We remotely sat together to cherry-pick the bug-fix-commits into their own branch and while doing that, I quickly applied some cosmetic changes. Nothing adventurous, you know, but only minor things to make things more readable. Things like this:
if (!object) { /* ... */ }
turned into this:
if (object != nil) { /* ... */ }
If you're more mindful than I've been over the past couple of days, you might ask: "WTF are you doing?! THIS IS JUST WRONG!". And I have to admit: You're absolutely right, it is. The correct version of this would be:
if (object == nil) { /* ... */ }
I heavily overestimated myself and due to the fact, that these were just small changes, I didn't test the app afterwards myself, because, you know, what could possibly go wrong with these small changes? ππ
Combined with my inattention this turned out to be more or less disastrous: Not one, but two of these changes broke the app. Thankfully, our testing team did a better job. They tested the app before shipping and they complained. I doublechecked my changes and quickly found the wrong code. I fixed it and everything was fine again.
So, hopefully I've learned some things from this:
- Check everything, even β and especially β tiny quick fixes
- Even tiny things can break your neck.
- Don't rush. Take your time to do good work and test it.
- This can happen to humans. A friend wanted me to include this so you don't feel too bad, if this happens to you, too.
Thanks for reading.
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