I’m not sure how I didn’t run into this before but if you have a date field in ruby 1.9.x it will not parse it in the American format (mm/dd/yyyy). Combined with postgresql turning an invalid date to nil, it makes for some fun debugging.
I usually set dates in my factories to “1/1/2000” but from now on it will be “12/31/1999” so I can catch this issue way sooner.
Also check out https://github.com/jeremyevans/ruby-american_date which will solve the issue quickly. (Note, this seems to break using non-American dates (dd/mm/yyyy)