During a software presentation for a group of clients i said:
"I reworked the interface for you. Now it's idiot-proof."

Not me, but a colleague of mine ordered 10,000 pens with <company>.com printed on them - but our company had a .org address.

Client asked to change the shade of blue to a little lighter shade. Deleted the hex code and typed the same hex code again and showed it to him. Instantly approved.

Specially if you've never had one

Browsing to a porn site while still being in the corporate VPN.
Got a proxy page which said this type of content isn't allowed at work. Nearly had a heart attack ;D

Just Bruce Wayne things

I am Computer Science Student
Yesterday I asked question to my classmates, what is Linux,

here's some(non-forgettable) replays:

3- An App
2- A Soap
1- Game character

and most (suggest me..a word) :

0- Linux Crackers(Food)

and that guy sent me this..

I charmed the graphic designer and we "hung out" a lot at my place during lunch.

The graphic designer was the boss' daughter.

I once set a customers server on fire.
Litterally.
I put my laptop ontop of the server rack and the additional heat generated caused blue smoke to fill the room.
The whole building had to be evacuated.
Firetrucks came.
The customer eyeballed me quite a bit after he talked to the firemarshal regarding where the fire had originated.

I uploaded a release APK to Play Store with the API host set to the local address I used in dev 192.168.x.x:8000 :/

Fucked up an sql join once and accidentally deleted myself from the employee​ table in the prod database. So I kinda fired myself... Good thing we had backups. 😂

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

I styled the entire site...with inline CSS....only

I had just started my new job and deleted 3 years of data that the client had spent over £450,000 collecting 😱

another developer used my PC to quickly access the clients database while I was out the room as I had sql management studio open. I went back to my PC thinking I was connected to my local database, did a few truncate tables to test my software and :0 minutes later I get a call asking why there was no data on the server!

Thank god for backups 😓

Who Is Who

➡ A Project Manager is the one who thinks 9 women🙍 can deliver a baby in 1 month.👶

➡ An Onsite Coordinator is the one who thinks 1 woman can deliver 9 babies in 1 month.👶

➡ A Developer is the one who thinks it will take 18 months to deliver 1 baby.🙇

➡ A Marketing Manager is the one who thinks he can deliver a baby even if no man and women are available.👷

➡ A Client is the one who doesn’t know why he wants a baby.👶

➡ A Tester is the one who always tells his wife that this is not the right baby. 🚶

Don't be shy.. Comment which 'who' are you..😂

Just deleted the prod DB without taking backup... 🤝

Naming a variable "dogFucker" in anger and accidentally committing it.

Used to work for a company that used asterisk for telecommunications.

Boss asked me to quickly change the call charge costs effective immediately. Finished 3diting. Went to piss. Some douche from sales came and pressed asdffggkl into the code, went down 50 lines and left it there.

Got back. Saved the code, pushed through live without testing.

Get a call three minutes later asking what the fuck did I do. There were already 450 call tickets from clients moaning they couldnt call.

So I went and checked the file I pushed. Tested it. What. Line 460 asdffggkl? What the fuck.

Removed it and boom it worked.

Got called in and said I cost the company four times my salary. Said it wasn't me, I wouldn't make a mistake like that. Told him that it was my fuck up for leaving my pc open, and that it probably was best to lock the screen.

Said I'm lying. Pulled the fucking camera footage and there was the fucker changing my code.

I got pardoned, he got a warning (just a warning). For 15 Min, I thought my ass was fired.

Will never make that naive mistake again.

Yesterday I used a company service account to email over 1,000 internal employees (mostly application managers and the like) about an old OS version their servers are using which must be upgraded in a few months. It's an automated email that will repeat each month until the servers are upgraded.

That is not the part that might get me fired.

The part that might get me fired is an easter egg I left in the html content of the email itself.

In the embedded html of the message, I buried a comment block that contains a full-screen ascii-art drawing of a spooky tree and grim reaper standing beside a tombstone. The tombstone has the OS info and dates on it. Beneath the ascii-art is a bastardized quote in homage to Metallica's "For Whom The Bell Tolls", referring to the OS end-of-life.

The ascii-art is visible in both the html and the internal git repo that contains the email template.

This is a bit of a shoe-horn for this weekly group rant, as I doubt there is any chance I would really be fired over this, as I (sadly) expect that absolutely NO ONE who receives the messages will ever actually see the comments. But it's out there in the corporate network now... and will be sent over and over for the next few months...

There is a better chance someone may catch the easter egg in the git repo, but I kind-of doubt that, too - so I wanted to at least share with my devRant friends that it's out there, so at least someone else knows than just me. 😝

I can't post a rant about wk50 because I know some coworkers use this app and I'm afraid they'll realize how stupid I really am.

A friend of mine went to her boss and said that she will quit if she won't get 50% salary raise - boss said ok. She told about it her working colleague so he went to the boss and said 50% or I'll quit - boss said cleanup your desk...

My favorite css troll rule 😎

* {
display:none;
}

I have a telephone headset with a "confusing" mute button. Sometimes it works normally, but quite often it will "double-toggle" (toggle twice as though I pressed it twice, which essentially has no effect) - so I'm either left muted or left un-muted, the same as before I pressed the button at all - so I have to press it again, sometimes several times, for it to actuary work.

While I'm at my desk, I have a visual indicator of mute status (a light that turns green for un-muted or red for muted), so I can easily tell if my mic is hot or not. My old headset had a nice audible beep reminder if I was muted, but the new headset? Nope, not-so-much.

I work from home, while my wife works at an office; so each morning she leaves, but I stay in the home office. I almost always see her off one way or another, usually doing or saying something funny as she heads out.

So, one day, I'm on a large conference call with a number of cross-team managers, and my wife is about to head out the door. With the meeting droning on in my headset, I was in the kitchen with her for a while helping finish clean up after breakfast and getting her ready to go.

She needed to pack an ice-pack for some reason, and for the random humor of it, I start screaming something to the effect of "GIMMIE YO ICE PACKS - GIMMIE ALLLL YO ICE PACKS - YEAH! YEAH! IMMA PUT MY BAAAAAAAAALLLLLS ON IT - WHOOOOOOOOO!"

During which time I am jumping around like a crazy person, including actually grabbing one of the ice packs, putting it down the front of my pants and screaming. Loudly.

It was after my own screaming I overheard more than one person yelling on the bridge line "YOU'RE NOT MUTED! YOU'RE NOT MUTED!"

I have seldom felt such raw, unadulterated panic.

I rushed back to my home office - yes, the green light is on my desk - my mic is hot. When I pressed mute at some point earlier in the call, it double-toggled, leaving me un-muted, and I never knew.

Even more embarrassing was the chat session I saw on my computer screen. It was from my manager (one of the managers on the call) - he had pinged me several times while I was in the kitchen.

It read something like:

hey, you there?
is that your phone
I think your phone isn't muted
mute
dude, mute
is that you?
MUTE!
did you just say balls?

Did an rm *.jar on a wrong app directory as root on a live system

I used to have this habit of developing with questionable placeholder content.

console.log("boobs").

<div>why the fuck am I still waiting for your fucking content, dave</div>.

<img src="drunk_boss_dancing_at_xmas_party. jpg"/>

One slips through, eventually.

Now it's all boring lorem ipsums and stock photos of smiling managers shaking hands...

My first programming job started at a fairly small gamming company. We were pretty close because we were so small and sometimes jokes were a bit too personal. Anyway, during my 3 months probation period, the team lead invited the whole company at his house for a party. Long story short, I got wasted, and when the CEO arrived I went to him and told him something like: Yo dawg, let's drink, don't be a pu**y. The sad part is that I cannot remember doing that and apparently I shouted outloud. I had some pretty interesting meetings the next days. Came too close to being fired 😅.

That moment when my boss and I were having a conversation (2 weeks into my new job) and she tells me her daughters name is "Amber" and I jump up with, "oh snap!! That's my dogs name too!!" 😑

I've had many, but this is one of my favorite "OK, I'm getting fired for this" moments.

A new team in charge of source control and development standards came up with a 20 page work-instruction document for the new TFS source control structure.
The source control kingpin came from semi-large military contract company where taking a piss was probably outlined somewhere.

Maybe twice, I merged down from a release branch when I should have merged down from a dev branch, which "messed up" the flow of code that one team was working on.
Each time I was 'coached' and reminded on page 13, paragraph 5, sub-section C ... "When merging down from release, you must verify no other teams are working
on branches...blah blah blah..and if they have pending changes, use a shelfset and document the changes using Document A234-B..."

A fellow dev overheard the kingpin and the department manager in the breakroom saying if I messed up TFS one more time, I was gone.

Wasn't two days later I needed to merge up some new files to Main, and 'something' happened in TFS and a couple of files didn't get merged up. No errors, nothing.
Another team was waiting on me, so I simply added the files directly into Main. Unknown to me, the kingpin had a specific alert in TFS to notify him when someone added
files directly into Main, and I get a visit.

KP: "Did you add a couple of files directly into Main?"
Me:"Yes, I don't what happened, but the files never made it from my branch, to dev, to the review shelfset, and then to Main. I never got an error, but since
they were new files and adding a new feature, they never broke a build. Adding the files directly allowed the Web team to finish their project and deploy the
site this morning."
KP: "That is in direct violation of the standard. Didn't you read the documentation?"
Me: "Uh...well...um..yes, but that is an oddly specific case. I didn't think I hurt any.."
KP: "Ha ha...hurt? That's why we have standards. The document clearly states on page 18, paragraph 9, no files may ever be created in Main."
Me: "Really? I don't remember reading that."
<I navigate to the document, page 18, paragraph 9>
Me: "Um...no, it doesn't say that. The document only talks about merging process from a lower branch to Main."
KP: "Exactly. It is forbidden to create files directly in Main."
Me: "No, doesn't say that anywhere."
KP: "That is the spirit of the document. You violated the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish here."
Me: "You gotta be fracking kidding me."

KP grumbles something, goes back to his desk. Maybe a minute later he leaves the IS office, and the department manager leaves his office.

It was after 5:00PM, they never came back, so I headed home worried if I had a job in the morning.

I decided to come in a little early to snoop around, I knew where HR kept their terminated employee documents, and my badge wouldn't let me in the building.

Oh crap.

It was a shift change, so was able to walk in with the warehouse workers in another part of the building (many knew me, so nothing seemed that odd), and to my desk.

I tried to log into my computer...account locked. Oh crap..this was it. I'm done. I fill my computer backpack with as much personal items as I could, and started down the hallway when I meet one of our FS accountants.

L: "Hey, did your card let you in the building this morning? Mine didn't work. I had to walk around to the warehouse entrance and my computer account is locked. None of us can get into the system."

*whew!* is an understatement. Found out later the user account server crashed, which locked out everybody.

Never found out what kingpin and the dev manager left to talk about, but I at least still had a job.

Reading some of the wk50 rants makes my blood run cold. brrrrr. They're terrifying.

While my story goes just like this.
Didn't know our manager(let's call him R) messaged us in our group chat that he won't make it to office for that day.
My account replied "Let's have moment of silence for those who left us. R, you will be missed. :'( Thank you for everything.".

I didn't notice the message until lunch time and my co-devs (with much back-slapping and laughing) told me I'm a gem. -_-
I just went to get some coffee, forgot to lock my unit and came back a murderer.
AND It was only my 2nd month on the job.

Using devRant during work hours 🤐😔

We had a mega rude, pompous asshat client come in who's company was SO disliked that someone made a hate site about them that was out ranking the client's actual site. They hired us to re-do their site and SEO to try to get back to the top results. We redid the site but we didn't improve the SEO. We also visited the hate site so many times we probably improved their ranking. 😂🖕🏻

Boss walked in on me and his daughter, you know.

A few years ago, I used alert('Well that sux balls'); to debug a CMS custom module. Finished the project and went with the sales manager to demo the app to the clients board of directors. Trust a sales manager to find a bug during a live demo that QA didn't find...
All my temporary error messages are now boring and functional.

After Hours of Coding.. I'm finally get in bed, but my mind can't overcome from fucking code and i can't sleep.
I don't know how to take proper and quick sleep after programming without taking any pills. Another side effect is after started programming 18 hr /day I'm losing my memory power, and can't remember some things properly.

And yes this image is Worth something to me... It describes my current situation.

Just one word

HELP !

I got a call at 12:30 one night a few months back. Apparently some back-end scripts I edited to fix an automated test setup crashed around 75 test pc's and halted somewhere around 2000 tests. I quickly jumped on, fixed the issue, and got everything back online.

I was up all night certain I would get fired. First thing in the morning the client says welcome to the club some, of the best have done the same thing.

When I had sex in the office and my boss nearly walked in thank god for locked doors

Not techy but there you go...

!rant & story_time
This happend to the startup I was working for at ~2011. I was a junior Android dev, working on a very popular app.
During experiments for a new feature, I discovered that the system AlarmManager has a serious bug - you can set a repeating alarm with interval=0ms. If your app takes more then 1 ms to handle the Intent, then the AlarmManager will start to fill up the intent Queue, with unexpected results to the OS. causing it to slow down, and reboot when it ran out of Ram. Why? my guess was that because the AlarmManager was part of the OS, then any issues caused by it caused the system process to ran out of ram, crashing it, and the whole system with it. the real kicker was that even after a reboot, the AlarmManager still had Intents queued, causing the device to bootloop for a while, untill the queue was cleared. My boss decided to report the problem to google, as this was an issue in the OS. I built an example app, that caused the crash 10-30 seconds after starting, and submitted to Google. Google responded later that day with "not an issue, no one will ever do this".
Well... At this point I decided to review the autoupdate feature in our app, to make sure this will not happen to us. We just released a new feature where a user can set an update schedule option in the app settings - where you could setup a daily, weekly, or hourly update for the app. after reviewing it, It looked good, and the issue was not triggered in the manual QA I did. So, it was all good. And we released an updated version to the store.
After we did an update-install, we discoverd that, there was a provlem reading the previous version SharedPrefs value for the update schdule settings, and the value defaulted to 0...
the result was, our app caused all our users to go into a bootloop, and because the alarm was reset when the devices booted up, the bootloop could only be solved in a factory reset, or removing our app, before the device rebooted, and then waiting a few reboot cycles.
We lost 50 places in the market, and it took us 6 months to get back to where we were.

It was not my fault, but it sucked big time!

Seeing the effect of 'DROP TABLE' in production

Um, what is git?

I recently joined this big MNC after shutting down my own startup. I was trying to automate their build process properly. They were currently using grunt and I favor gulp, so I offered to replace the build process with gulp and manage it properly.
I was almost done with it in development environment and QA was being done for production.
In the meantime I was trying to fix some random bug in a chrome extension backend. I pushed some minor changes to production which was not going to affect the main site. That was in the afternoon.
This Friday my senior rushed to me. It was like he ran six floors to reach me. He asked, did you push the new build system to production, I refused. He then went to the computer nearby and opened the code.
It was Friday and I was about to leave. But being a good developer, I asked what's the problem. He told me that one complete module is down and the developers responsible for them left for the day already and are unreachable.
I worked on that module multiple times last month, so I offered my help. He agreed and we get to work.
The problem was in the Angular front end. So we immediately knew that the build process is screwed. I accidentally kept the gulp process open for anyone, so I immediately rebuilt using grunt and deployed again, but to no success.
Then I carefully analyzed all the commits to the module to find out that I was the one who pushed the change last. That was the chrome extention. I quickly reverted the changes and deployed and the module was live again. The senior asked, how did you do that? I told the truth.
He was surprised that how come that change affect the complete site too. We identified it after an hour. It was the grunt task which includes all the files from that particular module, including chrome extension in the build process.
He mailed the QA team to put Gulp in increased priority and approved the more structural changes, including more scrutiny before deployment and backup builds.
The module was down for more than 5 hours and we got to know only after the client used it for their own process. I was supposed to be fired for this. But instead everyone appreciated my efforts to fix things.
I guess I am in a good company 😉

End of second week at a new job. Found what I thought was a bug and wanting to impress I fixed it. The dev reviewing my code had just started a week before me so he also had no idea what was going on. It went live Friday afternoon.

Come back Monday morning and turns out I completely broke everything and nobody could use the site all weekend. I thought I was done for sure. Was shitting myself all day waiting for the call.

TURNS OUT NOBODY EVEN NOTICED

A few days after deploying a big important Website into production, I wanted to copy the whole thing including DB back onto our test server for future testing/bug fixing if something comes up. (Last changes were done on production server before going live)
So I opened SSH, removed everything on the test sever aaaaand then I realized I was connected to production...
Took about an hour to get everything up and running again. We didn't tell the client and hoped it would not be noticed.

I was developing a project that also featured automatic payment to specific sites. I asked for a dummy credit card and he insisted I use the company's credit card. Who would ever want to give a developer actual credit card credentials for development!? I was a junior dev back then. Of course, I failed once. I got told off because I wasted money. My team leader defended me and said this is the risk of having projects with payments. I got proof I asked for a possible sandbox for payment or whatever that will work for development. Almost got fired. Because of that incident, I'm not comfortable working with projects dealing with payment that doesn't have sandboxes.

$ git push
> current branch is behind
$ git push -f

... 5mins later coworker is asking why his commits have disappeared.

Well on my first job we had to integrate payment gateways in client apps for online payment. On my second week in office I published an app on the play store with payment gateway credentials for a different client cause they were there as default values. So the money for one client would go to the other. Nobody noticed it for two weeks and when they did, I thought I had just lost my job and also I would now have to pay all the losses out of my pocket but fortunately I didn't have to cause no transactions​ had yet been made. After that I always checked my integrations atleast five times before publishing. The incident scared the shit out of me but taught me the value of developer responsibility.

Accidently deleted user table on production database and some backups where broken. Had to deploy a 4 days old backup...

Am I wrong?

Not really a fired moment because it was a university project.

A colleague of mine decided it'd be nice to set placeholder images to Hitler wearing a hello Kitty Nazi uniform. Oh without telling anyone, of course.

I go into the lab that a couple lecturers share, one of them was interested in the project we were working on and to our surprise the placeholder images pop up. I immediately say sorry, I didn't set that image and the guy looks at me with judging eyes.

Same guy has to take meds daily otherwise he acts up, not sure what it was he had, may have been ADHD, anyways we were staying late and he forgot his meds, and while our client is in the same room this guy starts doing the macarana behind the room separator, while we're supposed to give him a live preview of what we had accomplished in three months of work. Needless to say he didn't see him dancing like a moron but wow :/ learn to control yourself.

Same guy also never commented his code and used the two letter variable principal because it's such a great idea >.> Me and the other guy spent 6 hours rewriting his code, which should have been less time but he wasn't there to help nor was he available to yell.. I mean ask for help.

I hate University group projects....

One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.

On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).

Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.

I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".

Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.

There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.

Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).

Grumpy cat was in a lot of our internal products, on loading screens and what not, because why not? PM got pissed and said if he sees that fucking cat again blah blah blah. Grumpy cat is now summoned with a Konami code. Grumpy cat will never die.

Telling the boss i'm not writing bullshit assert true test cases because i have ethics

hmm let's see
>atheist propaganda during lunch time
>fascist propaganda during lunch time
>praising the rival of the football team boss supports
>suggesting we should drink alcohol in work hours
>teaching minecraft to boss' son
>talking bad about star wars VII even though boss liked it

Accidentally restored a months old backup because I thought the software was using imperial date formatting. I was wrong.

After doing the work he requested as he wanted he was not happy. So i thought we sit and discuss what he didn't like. I was so wrong.

...
Boss: "...you know what I think you are: a fraud; Masquerading as a developer. The database design you have given is shit. The template I gave you I did in 1 hour. You took half the day."

He gave a simple template to use and he told me to come up with an ecommerce db design via downloading PrestaShop and seeing what is relevant to us.

Me: "what did I do wrong?"

Boss: "you think I don't know what PK means in database design? Why the fuck did you put this here."

Me: "can I expl..."

Boss: "I'm not finished, you been here half the month and what work have you to show for it..."

Me: "I have..."

Boss: "You shut up when I can speaking"

Me: "ok"

Boss: "You have no work to show for the time you have been here. I tell you what to do. I want someone who is proactive. My friend, you will do the work I tell you to do, you understand?"

Me: "yes but can I just say that I have been doing your work I have the contact the various developers as you..."

Boss: " You shut up when your boss is speaking. Can you do this work? (Slightly long pause)

Me: "I can do it. But, I have done the bits of the work you said I do. I was h..."

Boss "don't give me bullshit stories...you haven't done the work..."

Me: "But you have spoken"

Boss:" You know what Im giving you 1 weeks notice if you are not able to do the work. Can you do it?"

That moment!!! I was literally shaking I could have high fived his face with his laptop.

Me: "yes I can"
Boss: "Then get the fuck out of my sight and do it"

Right now.. heading over to the Project Manager's office.

Not my own bug, but at our sister company there is a PHP developer who almost gets fired twice a year, once when the clocks go forward and once when they go back again. He can't program dates well, or use stack overflow apparently.

I accidentally triggered a reindex on an database with 14 million records in it. It prevented hundreds of people from doing their jobs for several hours. Probably cost the company tens of thousands of dollars. Didn't get fired for it, but man it didn't feel good...

Making an infinite loop of cat /dev/urandom for anyone trying to login to server via ssh as an April Fool...
But on prod server instead of dev server...

I once posted a snarky rant about the inadequacies of our vendor's​ product on their own social media page... It appeared during a live demo about "Managing Reputation on Social Media" with several marketing dept. executives and ruffled some feathers.

Bright side: It had the desired effect and a half-baked product launch that was doomed to fail got delayed almost a month until the issue I griped about was fixed.

We have 2 layers of testing environments and production.

I tested the changes on the 1st layer, bud since it was 5min to lunch i did not test on 2nd layer which is connected to the production DB. I pushed to production and caused 5+ websites to go full retard and went to lunch.

Came back to 19emails and 3+ skype msgs about "why the fck would you do that..."

Estimated damages nearly 20k EUR and i lost some permissions for two weeks, but my great boss helped me out and cheered me up by telling stories how he took down multiple servers too

plot twist: im the team leader of our office now :)

Killing your co-worker.

Left an anonymous FTP running on a huge client for two days 😅

First proper software dev job, very naive, tasked to write a 'soft switch' for a well known companies set of production lines, depending on what product was being produced at a particular time. Wrote it weeks before the deadline, forgot about it, night before I had a quick review and realised I had missed half the spec aaaand it was going live the following day. Shitting myself I pulled an all nighter, drove to the office at 5am, managed to get it done with minutes to spare for 9am. To my knowledge it's still being used today. I left shortly after that.

Created a batch script to write some filenames to a text file using a loop.

Missed out the echo command, the script tries to open 100+ zip files on a production/potato server (I feel like prodtato should be a word).

Server cries and crashes
Dev cries and crashes

I was part of a on-call rotation. We had ~800 microsites with decent traffic on this one box, because that's a good idea...

One day the box was experiencing kernel panics and causing core dumps. After exhausting every possiblity I decided it was time to restart the box:

sudo shutdown now

Missed the -r and the box was not accessible remotely. Had to wait for someone at the data center to terminal in.

Downtime was ~2 hours.

This was caused by a crontab that automatically ran apt-get update & apt-get upgrade... Also made by me... None of this should have worked or allowed to be done!

Fucking caching .... that is all

Recently wrote a script that would check 2 years worth of images, crop them, and resize to different sizes as changes to front end required those.

Eventually the script went into an infinite loop and crashed the whole CMS.
The worst part was that my manager was on a date and I had to call him back into office, since his laptop was still at the office.

The actual problem wasn't the loop.. I forgot to check if file actually exists before cropping... Error log size was 10gb!

After working for this company for only a couple years, I was tasked with designing and implementing the entire system for credit card encryption and storage and token management. I got it done, got it working, spent all day Sunday updating our system and updating the encryption on our existing data, then released it.

It wasn't long into Monday before we started getting calls from our clients not being able to void or credit payments once they had processed. Looking through the logs, I found the problem was tokens were getting crossed between companies, resulting in the wrong companies getting the wrong tokens. I was terrified. Fortunately I had including safe guards tying each token to a specific company, so they were not able to process the wrong cards. We fixed it that night.

Turned on a feature in production a full day before it was supposed to go live.

That time I thought I crashed a prod server which I had no access to physically turn it back on. Turned out it was doing its weekly reboot. Scary 3 minutes.

Previous Job I had finished a website for a client but the launch date was delayed (the logo was being redesigned) and when the client was ready to launch I was on holiday

Before I went I sent the files to my colleague and asked him to do the launch but spelt his email wrong

Never checked my emails on holiday so the client had to wait 2 weeks for his website to launch

Took down banking application on production server.

TRUNCATE TABLE transactions;

Fuck! Wrong DB...

Server was down for a night 😐

First week in the job and I was told to update an intranet page. Opened it in notepad, made the change and saved it.

Turned out it was a SharePoint site and saving it in notepad broke all the links and turned it into a static page. Even worse, it was the homepage of the intranet.

I blame lack of training and, in hindsight, how awful SharePoint is.

Anyway, at least we successfully tested the backup process...

Damn stupid me...
One of our customers told us, mails are not working with SMTP. They send us a working code example, which looked very similar to our implementation... I was not able to find out what was wrong for hours.

A colleague checked the code later. After 5 minutes: you forgot a ! before checkin the string if it is null or empty...

Shame on me ..

when I was a newbie I was given a task to upload a site.
I had done that many times before so I thought it wont be a big deal so I thought I never gave a try uploading through ftp.
Okay I began work on it the server was of godaddy and credentials I got were of delegate access.
right I tried connecting through ftp but it wasn't working thought there's some problem with user settings why shouldn't I create my own user to stay away from mess.
Now I creater my own user and could easily login but there were no files in it saw that by creating user my folder is different and I dont have access to server files I wanted to take backup before I do upload.
now I was thinking to give my user access to all files so I changed the access directory to "/" checked ftp again there was still no file.
don't know what happened to me I thought ahh its waste of time for creating ftp user it does nothing and I deleted my ftp account.
now I went through web browser to download data and earth skids beneath my foots. Holy fuck I lost all the data, all were deleted with that account it scared the shit out of me.
There were two sites running which were now gone.
Tried every bit to bring them back but couldn't do so. i contact support of godaddy they said you haven't enabled auto backup so you can't have them for free however they can provide their service in $150. Which is 15k in my country.
I decided to tell my boss about what happened and he got us away :p I wasn't fired gladly

I was testing database migration and there was some issues which I couldn't fix them. So I drop the table just to test if the issues are still there.
"Why nothing have been changed?" After some minutes I realize it was production database which I had dropped 😓

I accidentally chat this on our general channel on Slack.

"I've noticed you can tell how much a British person likes you based on the amount of insults they give you."

The problem is, minute has passed. How I wish I have the time machine.

UPDATE on production. Forgot the WHERE... bugger... Panic time!

In the first week of my internship I messed up the css by overwriting it. The company wasn't using Git or something. But luckily a colleague had a copy of it. Never been so stressed ever since.

Not work but

Years ago when i was in middle school i wanted to mess with the school computers a bit so i made a desktop shortcut for shutdown and changed the name and icon to google chrome.
The person in charge of the it department freaked out and thought some kind of a massive virus infected everything.

Long story short turns out they had an event logger installed, figured out it was me and what i did...
I nearly got expelled 😑

I wonder what the gitlab guy has to say regarding "getting fired" 🤔

I work as a front end developer at a company. This site is using WordPress and I need a paid plugin, but I wanted to test the full version first without paying, so I googled it. Downloaded it and installed it right away.
NOTE I was working on the test server, where all other projects are placed in a subdirectory of public_html (public_html/websites/<other websites>), but instead on placing the website folder where are the others, I placed it in the parent directory (public_html), (where are some others folders and files). Everything goes fine, but a few days later, I wanted to modify something in functions.php of that theme and I noticed a strange code, base64 format, so I decrypted it and turns out it's a backdoor that puts code in other files of the theme, so it can add an Admin in the DB anytime, so it can remotely connect to the website. Because, as I said, the website was in the public_html directory, and the virus search for the other folders and files in the same directory and his children, it affected the rest of the websites (50+).
I reported that to my boss, but says it's fine and to give more attention next time and to install the website in the same directory as the others. Couldn't fix automatically and I had to remove manually in every website every file created and the lines that the virus added.

Not at my current dev job, but I worked for a place that had us be On-call and if someone called we would all get an email telling us who was complaining, where the site was, the problem, etc.
This service was a 24/7 service.

Anyways one of my first times on call I definitely slept through like 12 emails throughout the night, and when I woke up the next morning I saw that the owner of the company had taken all 12 and resolved the issues.

I thought I was a goner for sure.

I was just so inspired that I already had a colleague I can talk to for the second year of existence in our company, then little did I know that one of senior was sneakingly making a move until our ceo talked that maybe we had a romance and he had a fiance.

I can't even taste myself on it. Gross.

Boss yelled at lead mobile dev for low productivity because the project manager present him wrong timetables and added accidentally one more week of work.

Next day boss yelled at the lead mobile dev cause the back end wasnt working well.

Project manager and lead back end developer enjoy life! Front is hell :P

Well it's not really a work experience but that makes me think of that time I deleted all the fonts from school's computer (5y/o)... I wanted to make space by deleting useless stuff, but after that every text document showed in Windings or whatever the fuck this symbol font name was. Well then the TA had to transfer them from another computer with a floppy disk, it took forever xD I felt like I was going to prison that day

Boss: hey can you loop through all the entries in the data base (PHP) to make a menu of everything?

Me: me sure thing, shouldn't be a problem

10 min in playing with the database...and I remove the table...FUCK ME?!!??!!!

good thing we backed up the night before 😂😂

Accidentally killed the ssh deamon on the prod server. I meant to kill my local sshd but confused the terminal tabs :#

Deployed new app server at night for a number of prime client companies

It crashed at peak hours

Just found out that my script is creating duplicate data on standalone applications that are on the field already :)
Time for a coffee break.

Ran a bamboo test suite which just printed '408 tests ran successfully'. It's only had return true :P

Periodically update test number.

Not fired, but shot by my college, if I create a ticket that our software-ui isn't rendered correctly with font size 72

Going live with 2 sites tonight. wk50 is not a good omen. Wish me luck guys ::awkwardsmile::

My teammate send a prank email to us(lots of bad swear words to our client)...unfortunately..he used the thread of client's issue. The next morning we're terrified to learn that the prank email was also forwarded to client.

Accidentally using a MySQL update and not specifying the where....yeah needless to say every single dB record got updated to trash data and the DB wasn't backed up....I was a brand new developer so....

Was running a script to create ~50 config tables for a project. Didn't check the connection on the window in SSMS. Ran the script against the production payroll db. Panic ensued.

I ran elasticsearch reindexing on production.

My manager asked why there's no item shown on the search page, and I slowly told him, I ran reindex on production.

💣💣💣

Technically couldn't get fired seeing as this was a schoolproject, but let's rant anyway!

So for a final assignment we had to create a WordFeud/Scrabble like game in Java with 7 others. We really got to know eachother and had a lot of giggles with the project.

At one moment one of us got bored and decided to photoshop the head of the person who's grading us unto one of the board tiles and we laughed and laughed...

...until we forgot to undo this during the demonstration >.>

Using a brute force dictionary algorithm to retrieve every employees password. Access got blocked for a day because they didn't know what my algorithm did, I deleted the main file moments ago. They only saw the curl scripts.

Well... I recorded my boss's talk at a small tech conference. Everything went just fine until I tried downloading the video from my camera.

It turns out under-priced 32 GB SD cards from eBay may actually only contain 256 MB worth of memory, while quite happily accepting recordings that are far larger than that.

Using the company's desktop computers to solve cryptographic puzzles (like mining) on the company's computers while the boss and someone from the IT were asking to have a look on the machine after one guy already snatched my keyboard.

Very scary moment indeed but surprisingly it turned out: the real reason why they came was because a techadmin recently removed a shared system account but some faulty clients kept flooding the servers with outdated login credentials which also triggered mass SMS on the mobile devices.

Luckily I could somehow take an opportunity to remotely call the script which pulled the emergency brake which I prepared to shut down everything. Close call.

Nowadays I think it itsn't worth to take the risk just to do something that could also be done with the own home computer even it takes five times longer.

Ever have one of those moments where you're running a service you built to update about a decade worth of police records, realize about halfway through that you fucked the loop and you're copying data from the first record onto every other record, and then just really wish that you had checked things better in test before running this on the prod server?

I'm sure the only reason I'm still here is because the audit log contained the original values and I'm good at pulling data out of it.

#1 Speaking to my boss in Klingon.

He thought I was shouting at him in Dothraki.

lu' or luq
(yes, I will do that)

#2 Listening to Black Sabbath during a server compile 2.6h.

Rebooted a server..
1 hour passed and ping is still failing..
idrac authentication is failing

I've accidentally submited a wpf bool-to-visibility converter with inversed rules. On SVN, right to the trunk.

As a junior dev accidentally running rm -rf / on a production server

We had application for appointments with cashier for invoices. Made some changes. Didn't test it. Clients couldn't issued invoices for half a day, were super pissed.

Boss was realy angry, tought I will be fired.
I wasn't.

I was working for a small welder repair shop when they decided they needed to upgrade their office computer. I suggested a PC due to it being cost effective and compatibility with the billing software the office manager /owner's wife insisted on using. They decided on an expensive Mac setup and had to install Windows on it so the billing software would work. When I realized what they did, I asked what dumbass would pay 2,000 on a Mac setup only to use Windows and the wife said "me".

Accidentally deleted everything in a project that had a very similar name to one I was replacing. Twice.

Introduced software that created failures to a product line and then let it sit for a week while contracts got argued.

Wait, why is nginx communicating from our cache servers to app servers using HTTP1.0? Added http_version 1.1 to a general config. Moments away our responses return 500 on our production because one of our module doesn't handle gzip. If I ever had a heart attack...

I went to a meeting full of business senior management and IT senior management and proceeded to dress them down for treating me and my team like code monkeys. I was quite pointed in my criticism. Now, I'm just trying to deliver to minimize the blowback. I was right, but not my finest example of communication.

If you're a dev don't sweat it you are the product

At a startup company I fear that every day when I fail to meet our over ambitious deadlines given to customers.

I'd been with the company for maybe two weeks, pushed some changes and updates to a client's site on a Friday afternoon as instructed by my boss, checked everything over and it's all fine.

Come Monday morning and this client is seriously miffed, not all of the changes had applied and the site was a mess all weekend. Turns out a bug with the caching plugin meant what we were getting in the office was different to outside.

Meetings were held and a new QA procedure was put in place.

Accidentally cleared user accounts table that connects mobile apl accounts with main system accounts. Almost had a heart attack​ but luckily Azure had point in time restore 😌

Doing personal online shopping whilst waiting for code to compile (took about 10-15 min every time, just for the smallest code change).
This was a really slow Adobe Flex system which I hated. Actually glad I left because no sane company uses Flash, even in 2012.

The test server at work was going up and down all day. Not great when I was trying to use my new dashboard.

Long story short I found out the hard way to make sure I closed my SQL connections

I once wrote an http interceptor for which was supposed to check the internal cache for user data and only do some work with it if they were (we manually controlled what and who was in cache). There were two methods on the service cGetUser and dGetUser I of course called d which it turned out loaded the user profile from the database which would be fine if it weren't done in an interceptor .. on a web service... With a little over 25000 requests per minute.. on each node..

Tldr. I accidentally wrote a database ddos tool into our app...

Once I worked on a custom CMS for a client who was really into breaking stuff... actualy he broke a lot of shit by doing some stuff on he's website while it was live!!!

Once after a hard days of work I had to publish the new version of the site...... first I checked that it is still working on the live server so I could take a backup.... gues what the website was totally fucked up......
I was really angry at that moment and this incident wasn't the first one so I created a user with bunch of swear words as name, surname, email etc etc... and I forgot about it..... so 2 to 3 weeks later the client noticed that user.... and wrote a angry letter to my boss....

Didn't get fired tho :D

When the screen says "unfortunately com.af.mf stopped working" at demo

When I was new developer and accidentally did testing of an important internal business app on what I thought was dev but was actually production... and of course has entered some crude humor as data because it was "dev".

So, I have to begin with saying that I was 19 and my first real job. I was assigned to ongoing project for big german web company who outsourced project for german government. I am fast learner so I quickly ended up as a only developer who works on this project, because company had another important projects. And since I studied outside of my native country and I can speak Polish and English so I was also responsible for explaining everything to customer during meetings. I worked for around 4 months on the project and was heading up to the end. 3 weeks before production deadline client wanted show the results to the german government but I was still working on the functionality. My boss decided to put the web team leader to my project around 8 hours before this presentation to speed up the development. around 30 minutes before the pitch I realised that some of the latest functionalities stopped working. I was trying to figure out what I did I asked my team leader, he said that he have refactored some parts of my code. When we found the right commit it was around 3 min to presentation and after the checkout some of the .htaccess file was broken so I fixed it quickly but Germans started the meeting a bit earlier. The website was crashed almost half of the presentation. After 5 minutes my boss come to my desk and he says that he just talked with our customer and they are so freaking mad and pissed that they will not pay us. At this point I was certain I'm fired...

Suddenly the web team leader joined the conversation protecting me that it was the fault of the project menager because he should assign someone else to this project because even though I am good it is always good to have someone more experienced to work with you and review your code.

Project manager was fired about 3 months later. I was saved 😀

What's a "Unit Test"?

script closing error-opened tickets from a customer using a tool which just repeatedly clicks on the same pixels over and over again... Error chance of around 50% if other windows open or the ticket window is resized a bit. There was a pretty high risk a real ticket a auto-closed with custoner-information by error...
Everything went well. About 1k tickets were closed by the script while I sat there and looked if it really clicks the right spots.

I changed a message (to the right one) that wasn't on the spec sheet, marketing got mad, oh boy...

During my first internship I had to change a number in an Admin panel (system called "sonata admin").

Couldn't upload the file through ftp, called my supervisor, he SSH'd into the host and replaced the file.

When we refreshed the site it was a blank page with nothing but the logo on it.

We got it working again but man what a scare.

Disconnected a production servers Ethernet adaptor ten minutes early. While people were working on it, and its failover was not quick...like five minutes not quick. Why isn't there a confirmation box on that Microsoft...

One day I will get fired for adding the jeopardy theme into our products....

wk50 will be fun! Developing 3 new projects. 2 real ones and 1 mockup to show a client how our product will improve his daily life. All based on newest web technologies.

Uploaded a virtual machine on VCS as an intern. So that people can use my code.

When your Hibernate object model gets too big, and simply accessing a user's page brings the whole site down... 😫

... and it was my code that pushed the system over the edge 😫😫😫

Fuck this place ...

I had a fun one for one of myself but then I heard a "technical architect" at my company used the same login and password for a project's production and development databases.

I then had to deal with the crisis of a new dev on that project blowing the entire production database to smithereens because of said decision.

Accidentally deleting files for one of our internal web servers because the naming of the directory looked like a duplicate of another directory. Thank goodness for backups.

-- Okay, I know this code is Jerry-rigged but it'll work for now.

Pretty sure that's racially insensitive to Germans but who knows.

For an web app suggest sub-domains instead of directory structures​. Got escalations, not fired, then I quit my job.

I was working on this attendance thing for a very prestigious talk by some amazing doctors(Which I didn't know at the time)

Being an intern I was seated next to the watercooler

So to think up a "creative" name
I used Water Mancooler as an attendant

It was all fun and good....

Little did I know that my boss was going to present it to said Doctors and they see that name as the first person attending

Needless to say I had a fun next day at work 😁

Back in time i was monitoring an asterisk server on a friday night. Usually it's monitoring cli is a calm terminal with infos and periodic notifications. On a random check i saw about a KM length red shit / blue shit. As it turned out my boss was using the password 2500 with the same username on a fucking SIP server and while watching football (heard from the voice logs) some romanian script kiddie's brute force script fucked it up. The journey wasn't stopped here. Next step was to them to foreach some calls with high rates to their own special phone number on about 30-50 lines. The first step was to stop the service but because it is a nice app it wont stop till you have an active call, took about 5 mins to realise it . Had to kill it a few times until it gave up. That was the moment when the 'now they are gonna fire me' feel kicked in. Do not use weakass passwords kids!

Worked with two different customers
(customer 1 is up to date because of active development and customer 2 got his update long ago)
Changed something for customer 1 and accidently pulled customer 2. 49 changesets (needs a db update probably). Rolledback and now keeping an eye on the error logs

Laravel ran the db install files but failed after the first table, on production

While I was browsing the server through a ftp client, it froze for a sec and the next thing i notice is that a folder is missing. It was then when i found out the "drag'n'drop" feature.. Ofcourse it took me a few minutes to figure it out and ofcourse everything crashed. Btw, it was an asp.net web application I fucked up..on public..with more than 100 clients...o.o

Not a job but some years ago I have set up a boot password, I don't even remember, on 2 school computers...
Just for fun...

They didn't catch me though :)

Why I can see new rants with tag: wk50 when we are in week number 18. Can somebody explain?