4 ms·

As always, a good reminder to treat all debug text as if customers will be seeing it :)

by ilyanep 11y ago

bonobo3000 11y ago
Fair point, but that would take away half the fun of debugging for me :(
- dspillett 11y ago
  If you simply must be profane or otherwise unsuitable in your test data, at least be subtle like instead of calling a user your are testing bad use cases with "that fucker" perhaps go with naming him "Sir Henry Isambard Tomlinson". But seriously: do be very careful with test data. While it doesn't need to be perfect it should never be potentially offensive, childish, or otherwise unprofessional. You never know when an accident will happen and your test case data accidentally escapes into releases or other material that goes to a client or prospect (I once saw unprofessional looking test data in a screenshot in a printed brochure - good luck changing that after the fact!) or when someone in sales will find the official demo site not working so decides to show a prospect a dev/test/qa instance instead (sales having access to such app instances may be a problem in its own right, but it happens). It isn't even just outsiders you need to worry about: someone here was officially disciplined last year when someone else in the team took offence to certain expletives being used in test data. He'd assumed no one else would see it as he was the only person on the task at the time, but as priorities changed so did who was looking at that piece of work.
  - chiph 11y ago
    At a previous job, we had test data that used an outdoor outfitter theme. We had values for canoes, fishing poles, tents, etc. under the name "Master Bait & Tackle". It was an in-house joke, until the sales department saw how complete the data set was and wanted a copy for presentations...
Sujan 11y ago
Anything bad in there? Didn't see anything...
- coldpie 11y ago
  No, GP's point was that this is a reminder that your debug text may leak, so you don't want to put anything bad in there. Looks like the Vine devs didn't. Good job to them.
LoneWolf 11y ago
Seriously what text? the urls?
agopaul 11y ago
This has always been my rule after seeing an ex-colleague of me leaving one of worst profanity you can say in a test build which was shown to clients during a meeting. I wasn't at the meeting, but I can imagine the situation
bmelton 11y ago
I've always taken the opposite route, and insisted that my debug text be as profane as possible, to ensure that I wouldn't possibly ship it with them included. 99.9% of the time, this seems idiotic, and it is, but while it does force me to be careful (which doesn't remotely outweigh the self-imposed idiocy), there was this one time where it did benefit me quite impressively. when a co-worker was trying to take credit for having written a web app that he literally wrote zero code for. He would get there early in the morning before I could and schedule product demos to management so he would get all the credit for what was essentially my pet project. That all worked great for him until one of the error states insisted that the managers of the Fortune 50 company I was building this for all do something profane.
- seivan 11y ago
  You forgot the added bonus of being incredibly childish and fun. Riddles and easter eggs are cool to.
- metamet 11y ago
  The Casper theme for Ghost (the most popular base theme people work from) has a comment at the end of its screen.css that makes me laugh: /* ========================================================================== End of file. Animations should be the last thing here. Do not add stuff below this point, or it will probably fuck everything up. ========================================================================== */
amyjess 11y ago
So, one thing my company does is that we have git hooks preventing any file containing "DBG" from being committed. Our logging system's debug level is called DBG. Thus, debug-level logs are only for temporary debugging and can't be committed. Several times, I've written lines of debug logs that consisted of log.DBG("Well, fuck") knowing that they'd never be committed and that we have technical means of making sure of this.
- tedmiston 11y ago
  It looks more like they built with debug config than a commit mistake.

As always, a good reminder to treat all debug text as if customers will be seeing it :)

by ilyanep 11y ago

As always, a good reminder to treat all debug text as if customers will be seeing it :)

bonobo3000 11y ago

Fair point, but that would take away half the fun of debugging for me :(

dspillett 11y ago
If you simply must be profane or otherwise unsuitable in your test data, at least be subtle like instead of calling a user your are testing bad use cases with "that fucker" perhaps go with naming him "Sir Henry Isambard Tomlinson". But seriously: do be very careful with test data. While it doesn't need to be perfect it should never be potentially offensive, childish, or otherwise unprofessional. You never know when an accident will happen and your test case data accidentally escapes into releases or other material that goes to a client or prospect (I once saw unprofessional looking test data in a screenshot in a printed brochure - good luck changing that after the fact!) or when someone in sales will find the official demo site not working so decides to show a prospect a dev/test/qa instance instead (sales having access to such app instances may be a problem in its own right, but it happens). It isn't even just outsiders you need to worry about: someone here was officially disciplined last year when someone else in the team took offence to certain expletives being used in test data. He'd assumed no one else would see it as he was the only person on the task at the time, but as priorities changed so did who was looking at that piece of work.
- chiph 11y ago
  At a previous job, we had test data that used an outdoor outfitter theme. We had values for canoes, fishing poles, tents, etc. under the name "Master Bait & Tackle". It was an in-house joke, until the sales department saw how complete the data set was and wanted a copy for presentations...

Sujan 11y ago

Anything bad in there? Didn't see anything...

coldpie 11y ago
No, GP's point was that this is a reminder that your debug text may leak, so you don't want to put anything bad in there. Looks like the Vine devs didn't. Good job to them.

LoneWolf 11y ago

Seriously what text? the urls?

agopaul 11y ago

This has always been my rule after seeing an ex-colleague of me leaving one of worst profanity you can say in a test build which was shown to clients during a meeting. I wasn't at the meeting, but I can imagine the situation

bmelton 11y ago

I've always taken the opposite route, and insisted that my debug text be as profane as possible, to ensure that I wouldn't possibly ship it with them included. 99.9% of the time, this seems idiotic, and it is, but while it does force me to be careful (which doesn't remotely outweigh the self-imposed idiocy), there was this one time where it did benefit me quite impressively. when a co-worker was trying to take credit for having written a web app that he literally wrote zero code for. He would get there early in the morning before I could and schedule product demos to management so he would get all the credit for what was essentially my pet project. That all worked great for him until one of the error states insisted that the managers of the Fortune 50 company I was building this for all do something profane.

seivan 11y ago
You forgot the added bonus of being incredibly childish and fun. Riddles and easter eggs are cool to.
metamet 11y ago
The Casper theme for Ghost (the most popular base theme people work from) has a comment at the end of its screen.css that makes me laugh: /* ========================================================================== End of file. Animations should be the last thing here. Do not add stuff below this point, or it will probably fuck everything up. ========================================================================== */

amyjess 11y ago

So, one thing my company does is that we have git hooks preventing any file containing "DBG" from being committed. Our logging system's debug level is called DBG. Thus, debug-level logs are only for temporary debugging and can't be committed. Several times, I've written lines of debug logs that consisted of log.DBG("Well, fuck") knowing that they'd never be committed and that we have technical means of making sure of this.

tedmiston 11y ago
It looks more like they built with debug config than a commit mistake.