Representative Line: On the Log, Forever

Jon recently started a new project. When setting up his dev environment, one of his peers told him, "You can disable verbose logging by setting DEBUG_LOG=false in your config file."

Well, when Jon did that, the verbose logging remained on. When he asked his peers, they were all surprised to see that the flag wasn't turning off debug logging. "Hunh, that used to work. Someone must have changed something..." Everyone had enough new development to do that tracking down a low priority bug fell to Jon. It didn't take long.

const DEBUG_LOG = process.env.DEBUG_LOG || true

According to the blame, the code had been like this for a year, the commit crammed with half a dozen features, was made by a developer who was no longer with the company, and the message was simply "Debugging". Presumably, this was intended to be a temporary change that accidentally got committed and no one noticed or cared.

Jon fixed it, and moved on. There was likely going to be plenty more to find.

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