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One of Sean's colleagues left Initech on good terms. It caused no small amount of surprise that the very next day their billing system started failing. The billing system which the colleauge had worked on.
No one truly suspected foul play, it was just a weird coincidence. Still, billing blowing up was a 5 alarm fire, so everyone was throwing every idea out about what could be the cause.
Late in the evening, after staring at the code for many hours, Sean found this:
if item.next_bill_date.month >= end_date.month
item.next_bill_date = nil
item.save
else
...
end
If the month of the next billing date is greater than the last billing date for this account, wipe the billing date and update the item.
It's worth noting that Sean's co-worker's last date happened to be the end of November, and billing started blowing up on the 1st of December. You'll also note this is checking just the month and not any other part of the date, like, oh, I don't know, the year?
While this bug could happen to any bill, it was blowing up in December because every bill's ending month was greater than or equal to January. So this code canceled all the bills due in January.
The good news was that they could reconstruct the correct next billing dates without having to restore from a backup. The bad news is that some unknown number of billing periods had been canceled for some of their customers, and someone was going to have to check the history.
Sean reached out to his former co-worker to politely thank them for an early Christmas present.
"At least I understand our billing code better," Sean writes.
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