Ben Halpern

Posted on Oct 30, 2019

What's your spookiest coding story?

#discuss

Latest comments (81)

thbe • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19

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 🚀 • Oct 31 '19

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

Jack Harner 🚀 • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19

Git conflicts

rhymes • Oct 31 '19

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 • Oct 31 '19 • Edited

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 • Oct 31 '19

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

golang #daemon

Antoine Caron • Oct 31 '19

I broke a city bus in Java!

Sandesh Gade • Oct 31 '19

Did a python crawl into the engine?

Mario Micklisch • Oct 31 '19 • Edited

One day I was working on a project with an overdue deadline and something really simple wouldn’t work. I was trying it in all different versions I can think off - no luck. At late night I couldn’t stay awake anymore and the frustration made me sleep with a glas of wine - a very deep sleep.

The next morning, still not sure what was happening, I tried again and it suddenly worked like a charm. But I did not do anything!

What was different? Was there someone in my house fixing my code while I was sleeping next to it?

It must have been this strange thing that hunts us from time to time ... called Cache.

Reece Dunham • Oct 31 '19

Trying to make a web crawler, but having to deal with so many different problems:

Locale issues
Emojis
Invalid HTML
Invalid links
- This does include links such as relative, like URLs that start with #, /, and custom protocols like (patreon://something - I honestly have no idea why this exists anyways haha)