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The git bisect run habit I should have learned ten years sooner

DEV Community·Matthew·29 days ago
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Last Tuesday I lost about three hours to a regression in our checkout service. The cart total was off by a cent on certain promo combinations, and the only signal was a Slack ping from finance with a screenshot. No stack trace. No exception. Just wrong numbers. I did what I always do first. I opened the diff for the last deploy, scrolled, squinted, and tried to feel my way to the bug. Forty minutes in, I had a mental shortlist of suspects and zero proof. The code I was sure caused it had been merged a week earlier and was already reverted in a different branch for unrelated reasons. I was, as my old tech lead used to say, debugging the file I wanted the bug to be in. Then I remembered git bisect run . I keep relearning this tool. It's been around forever. I've recommended it to juniors more times than I can count. And yet whenever I'm in the thick of a real outage, I forget it exists for the first hour, because my brain wants to read the diff like a detective novel instead of running an experiment.…

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