Debugging Life: Lessons from Code and Family

You know, being a software engineer has this funny way of mirroring my family life—especially when it comes to testing code.
Writing tests and raising a family both boil down to the same question: “Is everything still working the way we hope?”

1. Unit Tests — Quiet Self-Checks

Those small, laser-focused assertions I write for pure functions feel like the moments I take a breath, close the IDE, and run an inner diagnostic.
Did I stick to my values today?
A single failing unit test might not ship a bug, but enough red dots in my mental test runner tell me it’s time to refactor my habits.

2. Domain Tests — Inspecting Core Values

Domain tests validate the business rules that give an app meaning.
In life, that’s our shared family principles—loyalty, curiosity, kindness.
Every dinner conversation is an assertion: Are we still true to who we said we’d be?

3. Infrastructure Tests — Checking the Foundation

Before pushing to prod, I probe the network, database, and secrets store.
At home, it’s the literal foundation—finances, health check-ups, mental bandwidth.
If the ground cracks, no amount of pretty UI can save the stack—or the household.

4. Integration Tests — Family Gatherings

Bring the micro-services together and you discover hidden coupling.
Family reunions do the same: personalities clash, interfaces misbehave, but under load we learn where to add retries and where to decouple.

5. Migration Tests — Moving Day

Whether it’s bumping a schema version or relocating to a new city, migrations scare me the most.
I wrap both in down scripts, backups, and graceful rollback plans—because you never know which column (or childhood memory) somebody’s query depends on.

Shipping the Lesson

These parallels aren’t just philosophy—they shape the software I build. My Identity & Management Service ships with:

  • Unit tests verifying JWT claims
  • Domain tests enforcing referral rules
  • Infrastructure smoke tests for Redis & Postgres
  • Integration suites across FastAPI, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry
  • Alembic migration tests catching schema drift before prod

The result? A product—and a life—that both survive pytest -v.

Looking to harden the identity layer of your own SaaS or simply share stories from the trenches?
Reach out—I’d love to debug together.