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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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What's your spookiest coding story?

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks

Terror … when you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel it's breath against you, and you turn around, there's nothing there.
~ Stephen King

The worst terrors are those you know exist, and yet cannot see.

Like invisible characters that choke the life out of your YAML parser.

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone

Real horror comes when the things are "realistic". So I'll go with this one from one of my previous jobs.

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metalmikester profile image
Michel Renaud

Many years ago my supervisor at the time was making major changes to dozens of business objects and, of course, tons of unit tests would fail. He solved the problem by commenting out all the unit tests. No time for unit tests because, "the clients don't want to pay for that."

That turned out to be a very costly mistake in the years that followed.

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bellonedavide profile image
Davide Bellone

For me it was quite different.
My supervisor didn't want to have unit tests, and I wasn't able to change his mind.

So, I created them anyway (just to be sure that my code worked correctly) and I didn't include the project into the solution.

Of course, it turned out that they were useful, especially for a particular algorithm. But of course he didn't recognized the value of the tests, and that he was wrong.

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attkinsonjakob profile image
Jakob Attkinson

This must be April's Fools day...

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kendru profile image
Andrew Meredith

For me, it was agreeing to maintain a PHP application, then discovering that the 200+ base files were almost exact copy-paste duplicates of each other with some minor differences, and "version control" was copying a file with a name like page1.php... or pageA.php, or page1X.php, or old_page1A_x2.php, or... 😱

Also, most of these files were just stacks of includes of other "versioned" files.

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aurelio profile image
Aurelio

Sounds like you were hired in hell.... How long did you last there?

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kendru profile image
Andrew Meredith

Thankfully it was a freelance gig, but I maintained it for 2 years. I was always filled with dread whenever I got a feature request for this app.

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bolt04 profile image
David Pereira

Gosh 2 years😱😱 that's terrifying

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jamescalviniv profile image
jamescalviniv

I was an ActionScript developer, does that count?

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harleybl profile image
harleybl • Edited

Me too. I even went to the MAX conference in Salt Lake City. I built an online game show in Flash/ActionScript back in 2001. At a certain point the AS runtime would garbage collect my class definitions and then nothing would work. We worked around it by forcing a browser refresh after the end of each game to give the user a fresh runtime.

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cassandraspruit profile image
Cassandra Spruit

Definitely counts.

My first gig was damage control from the last ActionScript developer and boy howdy, it gave me plenty of cautionary tales of what not to do.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Same.

ActionScript, where a vector is a fixed-size array, and an array is always a vector. Shudders

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paulasantamaria profile image
Paula SantamarΓ­a

Me too! πŸ˜‚

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peledzohar profile image
Zohar Peled

I spent a couple of years maintaining a VB6 application.

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brianjdevries profile image
Brian DeVries

My current position involves maintaining a legacy vb6 application. Thankfully we're starting to switch over to VB.net, but it's a slow process...

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calebarapp profile image
calebarapp

I feel your pain. My current gig involves extending a 20 year old vb6 application. That’s of course when I’m not maintaining automation systems written in auto hot key...

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peledzohar profile image
Zohar Peled

Lucky for me, that era is long behind me. Working with .Net core now.

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paulasantamaria profile image
Paula SantamarΓ­a

Yesterday's DEVDiscuss made me remember about this one and now I can't stop thinking about it. The frustration.. the uncertainty!

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

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paulasantamaria profile image
Paula SantamarΓ­a

I love this πŸ˜‚

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grsahil20 profile image
Sahil

Cookie

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tommygeorge profile image
tommy george

At a job I had long, long ago... they banned headphones.

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fullstackpapa profile image
Nik O'Donnell

😱

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fultonbrowne profile image
Fulton Browne

But why?

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tommygeorge profile image
tommy george

I can't say much more without being unkind. But I can refer you to a very old tweet that contains a redacted version of the original memo. ;)

twitter.com/tommygeorge/status/605...

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Roy Toledo

The company got this really important presentation and we only have a week to get ready.
My boss, as he's stressing out, explained to us that we're expected to give 150% of ourselves. Stay overtime, work our asses off, and even sleep in the office if need be.
Each of us got a certain part of the task we had to take care of and we all worked our asses off for the entire week.
Eventually, at the end of the week, we made it!
However, when comparing our work, we realized that we ended up with 4 identical versions of the exact same thing.

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nicolasguzca profile image
Nick

Ouch on so many levels

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chachan profile image
Cherny

I wanted to filter content from config file (XML) of a production service (the payment gateway of an online store). So I did:

$ grep <Service name="service"> server.xml

Terminal behaves odd and I wonder why... Then I realized I had overridden the content of server.xml because I didn't use quotes correctly. Of course, no backup. Fortunately, before grepping, I did cat so the backup was living in my current terminal session. That was my first official day as sysadmin

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George

Spent about two hours working on a complex new part of the system I was on. It worked first time without any issues.

I think the devil will come looking for me later in life...