While I don't post often on this blog, I find it important to document specific problem, how I debugged it and the final fix. This is for future reference (for me), but also in case it might be helpful to someone someday. This is a tale about a PostgreSQL error, it's placebo fix and how going further to understand why it was happening uncovered a bug in Laravel.

I feel kind of privileged. I always end up with rare and complex issues to solve when developing on MacOS. After getting a crazy amount of reputation on Stackoverflow for the Xdebug on Catalina conundrum, this time a yet undocumented failure with PHPUnit arose. But again, I do like a good puzzle. Installing PHP with Homebrew or doing a clean install of MacOS could have been an easy fix on this one, but something in me couldn’t leave the question unanswered.

I'm all caught up in Unit Testing and Code Coverage theses days and while I plan on writing more on it later, I recently came across the perfect example of why you shouldn't trust a test and how code coverage can help you avoid false positive.