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Jen Chan -
dev.to staff -
Ashish Patel -
Murtuzaali Surti -
Top comments (81)
The worst terrors are those you know exist, and yet cannot see.
Like invisible characters that choke the life out of your YAML parser.
Real horror comes when the things are "realistic". So I'll go with this one from one of my previous jobs.
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.
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.
This must be April's Fools day...
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... orpageA.php, orpage1X.php, orold_page1A_x2.php, or... 😱Also, most of these files were just stacks of
includes of other "versioned" files.Sounds like you were hired in hell.... How long did you last there?
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.
Gosh 2 years😱😱 that's terrifying
I was an ActionScript developer, does that count?
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.
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.
Same.
ActionScript, where a vector is a fixed-size array, and an array is always a vector. Shudders
Me too! 😂
I spent a couple of years maintaining a VB6 application.
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...
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...
Lucky for me, that era is long behind me. Working with .Net core now.
Yesterday's DEVDiscuss made me remember about this one and now I can't stop thinking about it. The frustration.. the uncertainty!
I love this 😂
At a job I had long, long ago... they banned headphones.
😱
But why?
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...
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.
Ouch on so many levels
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...
One dark and stormy night, I was installing a Linux update and during the install the power went out, the machine wouldn't boot, then the power went out during the reinstall....
And this is why a 100$ UPS is the best Christmas gift a girlfriend can buy for a techie.
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.xmlTerminal behaves odd and I wonder why... Then I realized I had overridden the content of
server.xmlbecause 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 sysadminI 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.
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.
One time, my code worked. Terrifying.