Got an interview invitation from HR.

Accepted it without looking at the interviewee's profile (rookie mistake).

Finally looked at his profile. He was 5 times, 5 times more experienced than me. Had a STRONG resume.

Was under pressure a lot of pressure. I realized I was not at all suitable for being this guys interviewer.

Just one good thing. It was his first round and was going to be a telephonic round after which we were going to fly him down.

Clock ticked 6. Time for interview. More nervousness.

Called him. Guy picked up. Introduced myself. In a calm voice he says, he is busy with a very critical bug. Can we reschedule?

Now this will generally piss me off. But this time I was relieved 😅

First broken rule - Publish on Friday

Second broken rule - Delete without backing up

Major screw up - Main folder deleted containing several sites

Major problem - Cannot find anyone on the server team for backups

I was just trying to fix a "bug" for 2 hours and then found out I only had to "clean" to project..

So I did a rookie mistake this week. Connected a webapp for a client using Nginx and installed the SSL cert for the site. I decided to activate the firewall of the server because hey security. All was well. Went home feeling like I am the shit.

Next day I find out I can't log in to the server over ssh. Only to find out that I had forgotten to allow SSH through the firewall.

I had basically locked myself out of the server. 😞

Rookie mistake we all make at some point

University, first year. I went to my Java/OOP teacher's office to about the course (I had started programming C++ ~5 years ago).

I wanted to discuss the fact that some parts of the course seemed too theoretical for beginners in my opinion. Rookie mistake : do not criticize the cursus of an academic if you are in your first year, even when you are right. I learned it the hard way...

The teacher started to tell me that I was just a first-year student, I had no experience yada yada...

To that I replied "I'm doing C++ for 5 years. This is OOP so yeah I do know a little more than you think".

I will never forget his reply "LOL C++ is not Object-Oriented !"

I never went to his course after that. I learned a few years later that the teacher was a well-known a**hole along his peers and got fired by the University...

One time, I accidentally deleted all the data from one of the client's database table (invoices) because i forgot to comment the line from the script.

Good thing there were some backups and I was able to restore everything without anyone noticing. I was so fucking dumb at that time and I felt all the blood rush to my head at that moment when I did a SELECT * and NOTHING was displayed on the screen.

Rookie mistake.

Wrote a long SQL query yesterday for some data I was exporting. It was just about finished and figured I would wrap it up in the morning.

PC reboots overnight. Never saved the query.

// Rookie mistake

Worst thing? Absuse LINQ and not in a fun sexy way.

Entity framework > check.
LINQ query > check.
Standard IEnunerable magic > check

The developer had decided that it would be a good idea to thread the enumerable all over the place and collapse it anytime they wanted access to the data.

I know it’s a rookie mistake a lot of people make, but it was some pretty core data that ended up being used all over the place, so it was a nightmare to correct and it really impacted performance.

Needless to say they felt very silly when we explained how LINQ was deferred.

Something isn't working, I play around with the code, and try all possible things in the code. Still it doesn't work. Spend a couple of hours reading each and every line but still in vain. Finally, I find out that I was editing the wrong file (same file at another location) the whole time!! This happened a couple of times when I was a newbie, one of my most annoying mistakes.
Lesson learnt: Now when anybody asks me to debug his code, I first edit/add a print statement to make sure this is the correct file. I thought I was being skeptical, but it has saved me a lot of time (mostly interns do this rookie mistake).

Working a a GIS company, which just makes this so much worse:
Had to do conversion of wind direction degrees to shorthand symbols (N, SE, etc). Everything ends up rotated by 90 degrees, and the project manager craps on the dude that wrote the API I get the degrees from. He claims innocence, so I get it next.

Turns out, I used the Cartesian system (where 0 starts on the right) instead of the cardinal directions (where 0, North, is at the top).

Yeah, still haven’t lived that one down...

Made a mysql innodb database go do a fancy shuffle like schrödingers cat, with many tables appearing as "ghosts", in production.

still not sure what went wrong.
i noted it was extremely slow and thought restarting the service might Help it...

Ended up dong an internship for my school (not really internship, more along the lines of formal volunteering, but whatever) helping set up laptops for a statewide standardized assessment.

I made a program to log the machine's identifying info (Serial, MAC addresses, etc), renames it, joins it to the school's Active Directory, and takes notes on machines, which gets dumped into a csv file.

Made the classic rookie mistake of backing things up occasionally, but not often enough. Accidentally nuked the flash drive with the data on it, and spent a good while learning data recovery and how grep works.

Lesson Learned? Back up frequently and back up everything

After 2 days of debugging why, oh why, GridView isn't displaying the content generated via function, I came to realize I forgot to type a "return" so the widget is actually returned.
Rookie mistake, merely a rookie mistake...

Had a customer billing due today, spent 2 hours trying to figure out why the Billingservice kept failing. Had an uncommited transaction on another laptop. Somebody kill me 😑

My tech lead rookie mistake of the week. Makes ids in the MySql DB big integers.

Now react, python and pinecone are all converting them to scientific values resulting into invalid or missing values and lookups.

Fml I need to change companies.

Outlook out of office message because I'm sick.

"hey, I read your auto reply and figured you wouldn't check your email so I thought I'd call you. Could you help out with... "

Guess it was a rookie mistake to leave the battery in my work phone