“Works on my computer” was and still is the wrong attitude

I have waited some years before posting this. I started writing this document as a means of coping with my frustration back then. It is now promoted from my private to my public journal.

I get it. It is all too common and frustrating to try something in your machine, be happy with it and when you push your changes and the CI/CD takes over, the build fails.

@here X is working fine on my machine, but failing on Jenkins

typical Slack message everywhere

You have now pinged hundreds of people, across multiple timezones. Only a tiny fraction of them are in a position to support you. By any chance, have you scrolled up a bit before posting? Assuming it was infrastructure’s fault, are you really the first one facing it?

For the sake of the argument you don’t find anything relevant in the last five Slack messages and you go ahead and ping everybody. You have now provided zero useful information. And the person you implicitly demand to fix this, is not your part-time psychologist to take it with a smile. If anything, they equally (if not more than you, since they are dealing with hundreds of running builds) want you to have and wish you green builds for your birthday.

Your laptop is not part of production. When your code runs OK in it, you do not ship it with a courier to a data center. So, in a way, whether it runs in your computer or not does not matter, as you are not developing for it to run on your laptop. Your laptop is not production. You’re developing for something else, and supposedly this is what your CI/CD is trying to show you. Hence when it fails, try to think why. You know your tooling better than anyone else. Your language of choice, its libraries and whatnot failed. You reach out for help to a person who most likely has zero experience in your tooling and certainly knows even less about the application you write with it. Think of it, if they knew all that, they’d be a member of your team already!

“But this is a blocker and we cannot release.” Well, your P1 is a P1 for your world and I sympathise. But the whole constellation of systems and builds in your organization does not revolve around it. If it was a P1 for everyone, it would be known by every means of communication available. Your P1 is my P5, just like sometimes my P1 was your P7.

Would you ever complain if it run on the CI/CD, but not on your computer? No. One more reason why “but it runs on my computer” is irrelevant and conveys no useful information to an already stressful situation.