41–50 of 322 posts
I was off Friday, so I come in Monday morning to see that ~20k customers have been getting free stuff since Thursday lunchtime.
Lost something like $200k because of two nullable columns :(
Classic forgetting the full WHERE-part of a manual UPDATE-query on a production system. The worst part is you know you fucked up the nanosecond you hit enter, but it's already too late. Lesson learned? Avoid doing things manually even if a non-technical co-worker insists something needs to be changed right away. And if you do: wrap it in a transaction so you can rollback, leave in a syntax error that you'll only remo…
edit: This was after I asked for permission to do this.
Lesson learned: Don't EVER use Coldfusion as a web server.
Because of me, one December, everyone in the country who went to the cinema got to watch anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes of ads before the main presentation started.
Lesson learned: write more tests, monitor everything.
At Graphic Technologies, I set-up a computer for our client, the Bank of England printing building. My boss asked what the root password was. I told him. He said, "That's our password!" I was never clear what our business was-- who was our company, who was other people. I did not give a fuck or they didn't bother to tell me shit.
God says... do_you_like_it what's_it_to_you God pow vengeance fer_sure commanded spoiled_brat nut_job biggot face_palm vermin abnormal horrendous jealousy smile after_a_break
Two months later, the certs were expiring soon and we changed our configuration to something Android liked by default. The bad news was that our production Android app rejected the new configuration and only wanted to accept the current certs.
We ended up quickly shipping a hotfix that accepted the current and upcoming configuration a few days before the certs expired. There technically wasn't any 'downtime' as long as users updated the app, but this all took place right before 'holiday vacations', and the QA team had to test the fix while all the devs were away.
Thankfully, someone stopped me before I turned it on.
My story (though I wasn't directly responsible): we were delivering our software to an obscure government agency. Based on our recommendation, they had ordered a couple of SGI boxes. I wrote the installation script, which copied stuff off the CD, etc. Being a tcsh afficianado, I decided to write it in tcsh with the shebang line
#!/usr/local/bin/tcsh
In the script, the first few lines were something like:
set HOME = "/some/location"
/bin/rm -rf $HOME/*
One summer in college, I got an internship at a company that made health information systems. After fixing bugs in PHP scripts for a couple weeks, I was granted access to their production DB. (Hey, they were short on talent.) This database stored all kinds of stuff, including the operating room schedules for various hospitals. It included who was being operated on, when, what operation they were scheduled for, and im…
Blaming yourself here is like blaming yourself for being hurt after being told to drive a car with no seatbelt or brakes.