Was digging around my files, and came across this gem done by an art friend last year. So here goes...
Since its halloween, lets hear some horrifying, or amusing bugs one has encountered or heard. In dev, or worse production! 😱😱😱
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Best Codes -
Ezpie -
Shazin -
Pratik Tamhane -
Top comments (10)
To start it off, I would link here an MIT classic...
A Heisenbug, where a sysadmin seems to have emails disappearing when sent to users more then 500 miles away 😨
Had to maintain a legacy PHP project.
One file was 7000 LoC and had one class that was used all over the code-base.
This application was basically a bad PHP version of GWT. So all it did was creating hundreds of lines of JavaScript code on the server and sending them to the browser on every click, all neatly nested with
with()
.The debugger would crash if I set a breakpoint in the big class and the client code would change every click.
As you can imagine, there were multiple bugs in this code-base and I don't really know how I fixed it in the course of two years, but somehow it was stable at the end.
Getting it stable is one thing, how fast could you get it to respond with all that bloat .... on every click?
I don't know why, but performance was okay-ish.
Probably because most logic was handled already in PHP and it was much, but simple, JavaScript.
That itself is a horrifying miracle - know the original programmers who did the implementation?
Had similar experiences with several thousand of lines of PHP code, by multiple people, with many easy to miss performance hits (at its time), that took forever to refactor out.
And by refactor, it meant rewrite in a another language XD
One of my favorite bug stories: gamasutra.com/blogs/DaveBaggett/20...
Ahh hardware bugs, got a recet one trending on reddit : Where a spoilt MRI machine, was killing apple devices in the building - reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9mk...
I'm not sure this quite counts, but it's too good not to share. Another strange hardware issue:
Magic / More Magic
This is another timeless classic =D
Cockroaches drive me mental and push towards learning how to test.