👻 Do you have any horror stories to share? Spooky bugs, scary data leaks, horrifying code, etc. 🎃

Comments

[Ricardo Bánffy]

Every time one installs or updates the JDK, there is the message:

"3 billion devices run Java".

[Lorenzo Pasqualis]

Oh yeah, I remember many years ago when my CTO wanted to clean up a few rows in the DB and ran a select without specifying a WHERE clause.

DELETE FROM users;

The team spent the next week recovering data from printouts ( Hey, it was 1999 :) )

...Opppsssss....

From that moment on, we made him run mysql with the --i-am-a-dummy option.

[Lluís Josep Martínez]

In 1999 there were already DB backups. And many years before too :-)

[Lorenzo Pasqualis]

Oh, I know... :)

[Jess Lee]

Once upon a time, all my work from the previous night disappeared. git reflog showed a SHA but the line was blank and my work never came back. It was spooked and never used that computer again.

[Natalie Martin]

The "monotable".

I thought it was just a myth. An urban legend people made up for a funny story on The Daily WTF. But then I witnessed it. It happened on my team. Done by people I worked with!

We were working on a system based on a very annoying CMS. We decided to move certain aspects to a database instead of however we were storing those parts in the CMS before. I joined the team near the middle the migration and helped work out some bugs on one component we were migrating to the database.

I then moved on to another aspect of the system, which had some problems with the SQL. I asked the guy on our team responsible for integrating the database in the first place to see the schemas for the tables. And that he did... he showed me the schema for the table. Yes, our entire database consisted of a single table, with columns upon columns added on for additional features.

Now, I've seen some database table monstrosities before, and heck, I've even made some when I was first learning how to work with databases, but this was coupling completely unrelated aspects of the system together. I'm talking about storing user input and system configuration in the SAME table!

So yes, that was pretty spooky.

[Ben Halpern]

Just the other day I accidentally committed a ~200mb file to git, which is not allowed in GitHub, but removing it was much more complicated than just deleting the file because it already existed in the git history.

The whole process of removing it was pretty scary as it required rewriting the git history in possibly destructive ways if done wrong. 😱

But it worked out fine. 😄

[Juan C. Andreu]

Or when you forget to create gitignore and you see your connection-strings commited xD

[Hassan Sani]

Guilty of this😄😄😄

[Stojan Anastasov]

Working with a "REST" API today the error response was

{errorCode:1, error:"Error message"}

For the people who haven't had coffee yet, the quotes for errorCode and error are missing so it isn't a proper JSON. I think it actually took some effort to make it like this instead of proper JSON.

[Gergő Móricz]

Use eval()

[Stojan Anastasov]

I am not sure what that does... I am writing the Android client (using Kotlin), the server code is written in PHP :)

[Gergő Móricz]

Oh,

that’s a valid object in JS, so if you would work in JS and put it in an eval function, it’d return the object.

PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NEVER USE EVAL. IT’S VERY UNSAFE.

[🎃Raúl TorreSpooky🎃]

I remember one time that I was forced to debug a 7000 lines, obfuscated javascript file.

I think that says everything. :>

[pildit]

This must be hell..sure it was!

[Juan C. Andreu]

One time a friend of mine and colleague was "fixing" some purchase orders and he had to delete some of the rows. He opened Management Studio and got some queries running.

After confirming the rows he needed to delete, he started to write the DELETE query. He always commented the delete statements to prevent any accidental data loss, but that night right after when he has just written the table name part of the syntax, he accidentally pressed F5 because he wanted to be sure that the SELECT conditions were correct.

Something like this:

SELECT .. 
FROM [TABLE HERE]
WHERE [LOTS OF CONDITIONS ]

DELETE FROM [SAME TABLE NAME HERE] 
[HE FORGOT TO PLACE THE CONDITIONS HERE]

The best part was when he pressed STOP to stop the query and the cancel was not working, he panicked and unplugged the Ethernet cable from his computer. xD

To this day, some people say that some of those lost rows still appear on query results.

[Derek Palmer]

Being asked "why would I use source control?"

[Cristian Pallarés]

Oh, I've been told that, and that code revisions and unit tests are useless...

[Derek Palmer]

Terrifying

[Alyss 💜]

I once not only deployed on a Friday...I changed the hosting server and underlying software AND THEN deployed on a Friday. 👻

[Daniel J. Summers]

Did it work out, or did you learn why the conventional wisdom about that can be summed up with "don't"?

[Alyss 💜]

It did work out, but I was enabled and supported by the manager/director from technical operations. I'm not ignorant of the conventional wisdom and I'm stability-conscious. There are nuances to the situation which I didn't feel the need to divulge in a light-hearted post.

[Daniel J. Summers]

I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. :) I just wondered if it all worked out; I'm glad it did.

[Adrian B.G.]

One of my first days of work, open the project, browse, read and find 2 5000LOC God classes.

Good thing later I used those to practice all the refactoring techniques from a famous book and recognize most of the OOP anti-patterns.

[Wesley Ameling]

Which famous book? That could come in handy later for me

[Adrian B.G.]

Refactoring by Kent Black and Martin Fowler

[Charles D. Villard]

The word 'Drupal' will probably already send a shiver down many a developer's spine, but that's what I was working on today: updating a client site's core Drupal libraries and modules with drush. This is something I've gotten down to a mad, mechanical sort of a science, but it's not without its flaws. I went through the process only to be met with a styleless page, and what's worse, fixing any issues brought it to a screeching halt in the form of an 500 error! Thankfully this was only a scare as I had forgotten this was on a dev server, but never something to be taken lightly.

[Nicholas ―M―]

I didn't do anything to prevent the unnecessary re-rendering of a React component that used the Google Location API. Within a few hours of it going live, we hit our max amount of free API calls and the whole feature was basically useless for 24 hours 🙃

Thankfully this was when we were slowly reskinning / revamping our product, so clients could still use the old version and knew there wouldn't be a seamless transition until everything was finished.

And that's how I learned why performance lifecycle functions are important.

[Max Antonucci]

CSS ID selectors...nested inside MORE CSS ID SELECTORS!

[rhymes]

Definitely guilty of this in the past, due to some mess with jquery and widgets with dynamic content. Not enough of an excuse, I know 🤣

[Alex Pliutau]

For around one month I had a bug on Mac when Mac clicked random parts of the screen sometimes, like switch to another tab in Slack, open a tab in browser, etc. Then I found that it was my coworker who used bluetooth mouse, which was connected to my laptop, I used it one time, so it was saved in configuration.