What's your spookiest coding story?

Comments

[thbe]

Remove backup files with:

rm -rf /etc/*~

Unfortunately you have to press space after entering the ~ character, without you see the box dying quite quickly ... 😳

[Andrew Rohne]

I'm working with a 3-way iterative proportional fitting process. The total of the seeds and marginals should be around 500,000.

A sorting problem in my code (in R) caused it to grow the seed value to 43.6 tretrigintillion. That's 43 with 102 numbers after it.

[Jack Harner 🚀]

Designing and launching a Halloween Sale on Halloween morning. Bad planning on my part but I think it turned out pretty well. 😂

[Jack Harner 🚀]

The blinking eyes were done with CSS Animation. The SCSS Snippet:

 .eyes {
      animation: blink 10s infinite;
      animation-fill-mode: backwards;
      width: 25px;
      position: absolute;

      filter: drop-shadow(0 1px 2px lighten($orange, 5));

      $eyes: 16;

      @for $i from 1 through $eyes {
        &:nth-of-type(#{$i}n) {
          top: random(100) * 1%;
          left: random(100) * 1%;

          animation-delay: ($i / $eyes) * (random(30) - 15) * 1s;
          transform: rotate((random(50) - 25) + deg);
        }
      }
    }

[Craig Butcher]

BEWARE OF THE HORROR OF THE GIT!

MAY YOU SHIVER AS YOU REBASE!

MAY THE ODDS BE IN YOUR FAVOUR AS YOUR PR REQUEST APPROVED AND MERGED!

SEEK THE WISE MAN FOR THE LACK OF COFFEE!

AND THE FINAL HORROR OF ALL,

BEWARE OF THE TESTERS!

WATCH THEM BREAK YOUR HARD EARNED WORK. WATCH YOUR CODE SCREAM WITH DEBUGGING!

FLEE! FLEEEEEEEEE!

“Wow, the beginning Front End Developers course barely started then?”

¯_(ツ)_/¯

[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

[Yurui Zhang]

During my last year of undergrad everyone is required to work on a "big project" and present it to the advisors. I was really interested in mobile apps (btw this was during the Symbian S60 days) so I decided to teach my self Java (J2ME) and worked on a very basic Mint-like "Money Log" app.

Being really new to Java (and software development in general, really) - I wrote all my source code in a single .java file. Yep, all the classes, business logic, configs, everything. No source control (who needs it anyways?) And on this one morning, the app failed to compile, and the error message is very cryptic. The file was so big I didn't even know where to start (it was over 3000 lines already), so I started going through the whole program line by line, while trying to spot anything fishy with my naked eye.

The deadline was approaching fast and I almost scratched my head bald - after 3 days I finally found it, a spooky missing ; in the middle of the file.

[Vonnie Voong]

Git conflicts

[rhymes]

The time I was given a DB with dozens and dozens of tables with no referential integrity (they used other tables as a lookup), a PHP app (with no prior PHP experience) and told: "well, can you rewrite it in Django?" :D

[Maxence Poutord]

I had that project once upon a time. Everybody was sharing the same git user (for economical purpose), PHP were used to write some javascript (using string concatenation), thousand line of code per file, code duplication everywhere (with xxx_new.php / xxx_newnew.php)... And no tests... "of course"!

Cherry on the top: I never understood the purpose of the app.

[Vikram Sahu]

My goroutines got crashed due to runtime error on prod environment, where everything is transactional 😶 🙄

golang #daemon