Have you ever seen a small programming error causing a major issue? what was the reason? what was the aftermath? Did you ever do a mistake that haunts you at night? share juicy details... I will start - I once accidentally dropped a table... in production! TC: 123k
KCG's 45-minute, $400+ million mistake: https://www.bugsnag.com/blog/bug-day-460m-loss
Yes during refactoring I changed one variable name and forgot to change at one place. I have no idea how did that happen as I used replace all. But not sure 🤔 it still haunts me. It was minor mistake and my team did not care Much but it still haunts me. It’s been 10 years since then , I have become attentive after this!
What was the impact ? Asking because you said your team did not care much?
Umm the project was not working as it supposed to be. I ended up finding it and fixed. Luckily We had completed work before the deadline so we were ahead in the game and I made mistake in last stages. Also this was the first mistake of my career. It was so hard to take that in! So actually no negative impact but more positive on my learnings!
Tried to ask my cute coworker to solve 3Sum with me
Early in my career I was doing work for a client, they didn’t have a QA environment I was too young and dumb to press for them to create one. I made an update and pushed it to prod (which meant ssh-ing into the prod server and copying the updated files lol). Well my code had a bug and wiped out a bunch of the order details for a fairly large batch of orders that were placed on their e-commerce site. They lost a fair amount of money because they had no idea who placed these orders or what they ordered. There were also no automated back ups (surprise, surprise lol). Surprisingly I did not get fired and they listened to me after that about creating a separate QA environment. Learned a valuable lesson for sure
Wow! That’s a good one - thank you for sharing. I was once in a similar position - but I was asked by team lead to not tell this to anyone because that meant both of us getting fired (he was supposed to cross check as I was really new ). So we then announced that we found a critical issue and then proceeded to fix it. We got lot of appreciation- I always felt bad about that - I did not deserve that appreciation but I did not have the guts to go against my team lead
That reminds me of a situation I was recently in. I bought an app with existing customers. Problem is I know nothing of Rails but am a decent programmer. I hired a guy in India to do updates to the app for me since I really don’t want to learn a new stack for something that makes less than $1k per month. First thing I did before handing it off to him was block prod access and create a staging environment with an old copy of the prod db (probably a bad idea but no time to create fake data). First thing he did was run a command that dropped all tables. I think he said it was called “rake”. Nearly lost everything in one swipe. Or at least a couple of days.
Spaces instead of tabs
Python script?
Fuck spaces
A co-worker was asked to upgrade software from using Visual Studio 14 to 17. He decided that the best way to do this was to update the source code by replacing all instances of the number 14 with 17...
I laughed out loud at this and spilled my drink - this is hilarious!
Derivative pricing fluctuating at small decimal places thanks to using pointer to read beyond the end of vector during simulation. A known issue for years which the non-solution was to run regression tests by comparing only up to 4 decimal places.
That sachs
Geez
Somehow forgot to set a variable to 0. Left it blank instead. Turns out this was defaulted to infinity, not 0. Went to Prod with no issues. Passes 3 rounds of QA. A few weeks later a new station comes online and starts to get infinity stuff. A few sev 2s later someone realizes that there was no max value for this station. Costs hundreds of thousands in Ops costs to fix.
I'm sure null pointers are a common example
Fucking Java
I'm sure they are common with other language apart from java