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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

> Pro tip: rename your development directory (or even better: the workspace path in CI) to put a space and/or special characters in it.

A former co-worker changed his name in our auth system to include an apostrophe, so that whenever we handled names wrong he'd find it.

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I set my nickname to U+FFFD at one point in one work system, resulting in a variety of bug reports and concerned emails. I think I dropped it since it was generating false reports from people who didn't check what character the page contained before reporting it.

To have such thoughtful coworkers. On an old team I had two coworkers named Chris and once in a blue moon when they reviewed each other code master would start crashing because one of them accidentally left in an absolute path starting with "/home/chris/".

A related too for CI: change the system time to be a time zone that is during your work hours in a different day already than UTC. Really helped getting failures earlier than 4pm PST.

Could you consider rephrasing this? It sounds like an interesting observation that I'd love to understand, but I'm genuinely not able to parse it.

My best guess is "change the system time to be a timezone for which, during your work hours, the other-timezone is in a different day than UTC is" - but I'm still not sure what effect that would have on CI failures.

Maybe an example of the failure this detects helps: when I used to work on Rails apps in the olden days it was easy to call Time.now and get the local time instead of Time.zone.now to get UTC time. This often lead to wrong dates but tests would only fail once it was a new day in UTC land but still the old day in the local time zone. Making the CI machine's system time something Fiji time really helped in getting failures much sooner after changes were pushed.

I read that as "set your CI to run earlier in your workday so you don't get new error reports at the end of the day." Midnight UTC being 4 pm/16:00 PST.

At my last job we had a wild time-zone bug that only happened with your system location set to Mumbai. I left mine set to that for the rest of my time there.

Related: here's a recent Firefox bug about a test that failed during the daylight saving time change:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1739847

One of the systems I built is being used by a group of younger people. I included an emoji in the superuser account name, just to make sure it would work. And to remind me to think more broadly about user input.

I've used to have a space in my user name and even contemplated to add a bit of non-1252 Unicode. You find a lot of issues, but unfortunately often in tools you have little control over and end up not being able to work effectively at times. It ended up being more frustrating than helpful.

Áčçëñts hęlp tóø

For anyone curious, this is called Pseudo-localization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudolocalization). I first singled across this in Raymond Chen's blog.

I add a Japanese character into any .py, .js and .html file to ensure that Unicode is working properly through the entire chain. Mostly in form of a variable which gets passed along, even in URL parameters.

my test accounts always have emojis + accents + other weird characters.

it keeps everybody on their toes lol.

the proper name of the glorious sultan of slack, j. r. "bob" dobbs, has the quotation marks and therefore is a great subject for this

Oh, I like this!

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/327/

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