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Discussion on: What was the worst bug you've ever written?

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

I was messing with a (dumb) co worker. I told him that β€˜rm -rF /β€˜ would fix all issues in his code. As a joke I added it at to the top of the loader for our web app... I accidentally pushed it to a production server. Long story short I lost my job and had to rewrite everything.

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terceranexus6 profile image
Paula

Damn, this is hardcore

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dfellini profile image
Dan Fellini

Epic. I love it.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Are you being serious? That is remarkable.

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

I’m dead serious.

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rogerogeroger profile image
πš“πš˜πš•πš•πš’ | πš πš’πš•πšŒπš˜

that's the Chicago Fire method of fixing things-- burn it all down, and start over

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mpeyper profile image
Michael Peyper

I think you win this round or "who's made the biggest mistake"

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

Oh man... My heart really sunk for you...

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

It did fix all code issues though :)

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

To your credit you identified a number of workflow issues doing that:

  • peer review anyone?
  • the code only /exists/ on production (where's the source control)?
  • firing you /before/ asking you to re-write seems pretty short sighted..

I hope you've got a job somewhere more thoughtful now :)

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jake profile image
Jake Casto

Thank you for trying to credit me, a few issues there haha. I was the primary reviewer, I had worked on everything so long that no one really bothered reviewing my code. We had two git repos, one development & one production. I pushed the commit to the production repo instead of the development one haha.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Yikes! This is exactly why we tell people not to make light of death commands. :P You make that mistake once, and never again!

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alephnaught2tog profile image
Max Cerrina

Such a benign version, but I still remember how super upset I was as a kid and someone told me alt+f4 would refresh the page or something.

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rogerogeroger profile image
πš“πš˜πš•πš•πš’ | πš πš’πš•πšŒπš˜

"there's this really cool Gameboy cheat code for Tetris, if you press 'Select, Start, B, and A' all at the same time" is a really cool/cruel joke kids of the early 90s would tell each other ...

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rogerogeroger profile image
πš“πš˜πš•πš•πš’ | πš πš’πš•πšŒπš˜

more related to your benign example (and even more benign): when i was first really tinkering with Linux back in like 2001/2002, i couldn't figure out how to get out of this program i was using (you'd think it would be Vi, but it was probably just a Man page) and a co-worker suggested Alt-F4-- while that did technically get me unstuck from my issue, it took me another day or so to figure out what i'd actually done

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald

Let me guess - erases scores?

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rogerogeroger profile image
πš“πš˜πš•πš•πš’ | πš πš’πš•πšŒπš˜

it reboots the device!

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

On IRC it'd be "use /quit bugging me " to ignore someone.

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pgoodjohn profile image
Pietro Bongiovanni

I once ran rm -rf / in a virtual machine just for fun to see what it would happen.

The VM had some shared disks with my actual OS and it started deleting everything that I had on my desktop and some other important folders.

I was long due for a backup so I ended up losing a crap ton of data, but now I will never forget to check for shared disks when i'm working in a VM.