We often think production bugs happen because of big oversights or complex logic failures. But sometimes, it’s the smallest things—a single typo—that sneak past every safeguard and cause trouble in live environments. Recently, I had one such experience in a Rails project. It wasn’t a major crash, but it did break a piece of business logic under specific conditions. More importantly, it taught me valuable lessons about code reviews, rubocop, and testing discipline—lessons I’d like to share here. The Safeguards We Already Had Like most teams, we don’t push code directly to production. Instead, we follow a layered safety net: ✅ Pre-commit checks to catch obvious mistakes ✅ RSpec test cases to validate logic ✅ CI pipelines to enforce standards and run checks ✅ Code reviews to ensure human oversight ✅ QA testing before deployment You’d think with all this in place, no typo could possibly slip through. So how did it happen? Where Things Went Wrong: Rubocop and a “Helpfu...
Hey everyone! Ever been in a situation where you solve a tricky technical problem, celebrate your victory, only to face the exact same problem months later with no memory of your brilliant solution? 😅 That's exactly what happened to me, and it taught me a valuable lesson about documenting those "one-off" solutions. The Genesis of a Python Problem 💡 In our project, we had a unique requirement: efficiently manage feature flags. Our solution involved moving one of our API endpoints to an AWS Lambda Function. My task? Replicate the existing API response using Python and, of course, use the same environment variables. Sounds straightforward, right? Initially, it felt like smooth sailing. I got hold of the existing Python code used for authorization, analyzed how to handle requests and responses, and started writing my own. But then came the pain point: setting up a Python virtual environment (venv). As a Rails developer, Python venvs were a foreign concept to me. I was c...