Finding bugs in Ruby

As some people may know I happen to maintain an Ruby API wrapper for Woodpecker. Some time ago a friend of mine who works there gave me a heads up that they would be updating the API. I decided to give the code a cleanup before doing anything else. Among the things I decided to change was to migrate to use the Time class instead of DateTime. This apparently introduced a regression.

The date returned by Woodpecker’s API is as follows – 2018-05-17T12:17:11+0200. My first thought was that this somehow isn’t a valid ISO8601 date. A quick glance at the ever (un?)trusty Wikipedia confirmed my idea. The colon between hours and minutes in the time zone designator was missing. I decided that DateTime is behaving incorrectly – it should error out the same way that Time does when provided an invalid format. I quickly filed a bug report and called it day thinking it won’t get fixed any time soon (people should be busy with Ruby 3x3, right?).

Not only was I wrong about the colon being mandatory in the time zone designator, but I was also wrong about the time it took to fix the bug. A mere 2 hours.

In the end I used Time.parse and made sure the library still works as intended. It sure was fun.