Okay, so, you've heard of Test Driven Development, where tests (unit, functional, system, integration, and contract) are written first, then the code that passes the tests is written to that test's specifications, as a way to write good, efficient, tested code.

There are also Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), example-driven development (EDD) and story test-driven development (SDD) styles of code writing. I'm most familiar with the last.

We have (mostly because I wanted) a tech-debt sprint every 4th sprint on my main project at work. These are sprints where we do not introduce new features, but rather fix bugs, improve infrastructure, increase performance, or refactor that write-once-to-learn-copy-once-and-shit-copy-again code into a don't repeat yourself (DRY) bit of code. When feature development is blocked, for whatever reason, we continue developing, but the priority order is often unclear.

Until today.

Katherine commented she was doing Irritation Driven Development (IDD) and I love the term. "These things bug the F out of me, I am going to fix this" seems a great way to bring joy back into a project and code. I am delighted.

I have this code in a model in a Rails project.

  validates :name, presence: true, on: :create
  validates :email, presence: true, format: { with: URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP }, on: create

Let's put it in an Author model:

class Author < ApplicationRecord
  validates :name, presence: true, on: create
  validates :email, presence: true, format: { with: URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP }, on: create
end

When retrieving a list of all of the authors without email addresses (because, well, we are cleaning up these things) with this line of code:

  authors = Author.where(:email: nil)

... two new blank authors are created at the WHERE query. Both of their names and emails are blank. This is absurd!

Find the bug.

I narrowed the problem down to those validates lines, but could not see the bug. After an hour of puzzling, I asked Katherine to look. When she said, "what the?" I felt a little bit better that this was something weird.

She figured it out, though.

class Author < ApplicationRecord
  validates :name, presence: true, on: :create
  validates :email, presence: true, format: { with: URI::MailTo::EMAIL_REGEXP }, on: :create
end

F'ing symbols. Yay for Katherine's second set of eyes! Whoo!

"I hope you take this the way it is intended, but, you'd make a good dyke."

Yes, yes, I would. I have the whole "who the F cares about clothes" vibe. Makeup and I don't get along, but I know the origins of that one. Though, let's be real, that's not really what being a dyke is actually about. Yet, I wholehearted agree I would, except that my attraction to women sexually is close enough to zero to be considered zero.

The comment, though, had me heading down the rabbit hole of "Is the word dyke offensive?" It has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+++++++ community, so no, but, as always, context matters. Someone intending the word as a slur is offensive. Someone using the word as a term of endearment is not offensive. Like a lot of words.

And the etymology of the word? FASCINATING. Go read it.

Given my brother thought I was gay when I was in high school, I guess I give off gay, dyke vibes. Except to gay people. They know I'm not.

The thing that gets me about Covid is that 3-5 day incubation period between catching covid, and showing symptoms. Sure, Covid isn't a zombie virus that has a 28 day incubation period, which is good. I can only imagine how sucky we would be as a culture and society and race if Covid had a 28 day incubation period. We would have so many more deaths.

Anyway, friend caught covid. I had had dinner at his place last Tuesday evening, the day he was feeling off. At the end of dinner when we were all sitting around talking, as we often do, he commented he had a shooting pain up the back of his neck, similar to when he had Covid six weeks ago. "It's not Covid, I just had it," he said. "You can't build immunity to something that changes every month," I responded. I then left in a hurry, thinking flu, RSV, Covid, a cold, pick one, any one, they all suck. Two days later he was testing positive for Covid. I am sad for my friend. Covid sucks.

I mask in public by default, and avoid almost everyone these days, my few friends excepted, so isolating isn't difficult at least, if I am infectous. Yay for remote work.

I haven't tested positive so far this round. I have, however, been in bed or on the couch for 14+ hours a day for each of the last five days. Walking is about as much as I can manage, movement wise. I was going to start the 75 Hard challenge on February 1st. I skipped that. I don't know how much of this is psychosomatic and how much is shit-I-have-covid. See above: testing negative. Radical rest has been my default, though, this month so far.

Or maybe all this is just ennui, an attempt by my psyche to shift me over onto my path.