Satire
It Works on My Machine
A phrase so powerful it ends investigations, closes tickets, and starts arguments.
The bug report comes in. Reproducible in production. Screenshots attached. Three users affected.
You pull the branch. You run it locally.
It works.
What Actually Happens
Your local environment has a .env file from 8 months ago that nobody else has. Your Node version is different. Your database has seeded data that production doesn't. You have a library version pinned from a hotfix you forgot about. The bug is real. Your machine simply doesn't know that.
You spend 2 hours reproducing it. You eventually find that it only happens when the user's timezone is UTC+8 and it's after 6 PM on a Thursday.
You are in UTC+8. It is Thursday. It is 6:07 PM. The bug appears.
“Then we ship your machine. Problem solved. I'll write the Dockerfile.”
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Let's talk architecture →How a Builder Should Respond
You reproduce the bug in an environment that matches production before drawing any conclusions. You lock your local config to parity — same Node version, same env vars, same seed data — and you maintain that parity deliberately. When a bug is environment-specific, you document the exact conditions before fixing it. The commit message names the root cause, not just the symptom. Then you add it to the onboarding doc so the next person doesn't spend two hours on a Thursday.
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