Three letters and some numbers. That’s how we track project tickets in my office.
Our release team has recently started sending out emails with all of the features and bug fixes included in each release (including the ticket numbers), and on Friday I was very excited to see one particular ticket listed there — IPT-6340.
What’s so special about IPT-6340? To most people, not much. It was a small but critical bug with a button that needed to be fixed ASAP. But to me, it was everything.
Since a few months after I started my job, I’ve been working on a big project that I didn’t really love (although it did involve learning something new, which was cool but incredibly frustrating). This week I stopped working on that project and started working on bug fixes. I started with a not-particularly-critical bug, which I was mostly able to solve, but I’m having some issues testing. While I was trying to figure out the tests, my coworker asked me to fix a critical bug that had been reported … a bug that I would later know as IPT-6340.
The bug fix itself wasn’t super complicated, thankfully. My coworker told me what we suspected the issue was what he thought would be a good way to fix it, and I wrote a few lines of code to execute that idea. We pushed it to a testing environment, QA tested it, and then we pushed it to our production site, where QA validated it again. All looked good. Nothing too complicated there.
But … it was my first bug fix merged into the code. It may not seem like much, but to me, it was a big deal. It was a new step in my development journey. So I’m celebrating IPT-6340 … hopefully the first of many bug fixes for me. Because celebrating the little things is just as important as celebrating the big victories.