Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "silly mistakes"
-
There was a time I made an update on one of our client's e-commerce website sign-up page. The update caused a bug that allowed new users to create an account without actually creating an account.
The code block meant to save user credentials (i.e email address and password) to the database was commented out for some reasons I still can't remember to this day. After registration new users had their session created just as normal but in reality they have no recorded account on the platform. This shit went on like this for a whole week affecting over 350 new customers before the devil sent me a DM.
I got a call from my boss on that weekend that some users who had made purchases recently can't access their account from a different device and cannot also update their password. Nobody likes duty calls on a weekend, I grudgingly and sluggishly opened up my PC to create a quick fix but when I saw what the problem was I shut down my PC immediately, I ran into the shower like I was being chased by a ghost, I kept screaming "what tha fuck! what tha fuck!!" cus I knew hell was about to break loose.
At that moment everything seemed off as if I could feel everything, I felt the water dripping down my spine, I could hear the tiniest of sound. I thought about the 350 new customers the client just lost, I imagined the raving anger on the face of my boss, I thought about how dumb my colleagues would think I was for such a stupid long running bug.
I wondered through all possible solutions that could save me from this embarrassment.
-- "If this shitty client would have just allowed us verify users email before usage things wouldn't have gotten to this extent"
-- "Should I call the customers to get their email address using their provided telephone?... No they'd think I'm a scammer"
-- "Should I tell my boss the database was hacked? Pffft hack my a**",
-- "Should I create a page for the affected users to re-verify their email address and password? No, some sessions may have expired"
-- "Or maybe this the best time to quit this f*ckn job!"
... Different thoughts from all four corners of the bathroom made it a really long bath. Finally, I decided it was best I told my boss what had happened. So I fixed the code, called my boss the next day and explained the situation on ground to him and yes he was furious. "What a silly mistake..!" he raged and raged. See me in my office by Monday.
That night felt longer than usual, I couldn't sleep properly. I felt pity for the client and I blamed it all on myself... yeah the "silly mistake", I could have been more careful.
Monday came boss wasn't at the office, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday not available. Next week he was around and when we both met the discussion was about a different project. I tried briefing him about last week incident, he seems not to recall and demands we focus on the current project.
However, over three hundred and fifty customers swept under the carpet courtesy of me. I still felt the guilt of that f*ck up till this day.1 -
Today at work I found this in the code...
if (argCount < 2 && argCount > 3) {
// log invalid arg count
return;
}
And this passed code inspection and has been sitting there unnoticed for about a year and a half... 😂
Whether it's mixing up and with or, or forgetting a semicolon, we've all done it at some point! 😊6 -
Do you ever have those weeks where you have to fix a bug, then uncover another bug then another then another. Then you realise some functionality is completely missing. You write tests to cover your bug fixes and new functionality. Then you realise tests are broken with your fixes and you have no idea why. Then you get so frustrated you start making silly mistakes. Then your debugger starts playing up.... Yeah that's been my week.5
-
>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good
~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved
...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol8 -
As a final year student it makes me feel proud about things I do now, back in 2014 I was newbie to programming and after the years of study ( I skip collages in order to study by my self at home since my syllabus is too old for me to keep up with new technologies. ) I still feel like shit against brilliant programmers on the internet.
My journey untill now was frustrating and side by side it was fun too, I have spent several days to figure out very minor problems in my programme which made me forced to learn even more in order to avoid silly mistakes in future.
Those four lines of output were really true worth of that forty lines of code.
Every one of us, in their entire life at least once had thought about which programming languages to learn first and yes I was one of those guy who used to search on Google, watched YouTube videos and asked seniors for the same advice but soon I realized it's never enough to completely learn even one language. Each and every programming language is based on similar logical structure. No matter how different it's syntax is it won't make much of a difference.
I am thankful to internet and all of those guys who make video tutorials, help on q&a forum (stack overflow) , publish posts on website and all of IT community guys. I made it this far it's all thanks to you and I know it's just beginning of spectacular journey ahead.undefined thanks programmer programming quote blog blogging journey life of programmer life internet it crowd2 -
Developing a notification API, sends emails to subscribers, email API can take only 100 IDs at once, so partitioned the email list and send mails in blocks of 100.
Forgot to reset the list after every block, so each new partition got appended to the existing list and kept going on.
Ran it against a test DB, which was recently refreshed with near-prod data !!! Thousands of emails went out of the app server in one shot and everybody receiving numerous duplicate emails. Especially the ones in the very first partition.
Got an incident raised by the CEO himself reg the flurry of emails. But, things were out of our hands, quite literally. All emails are queued up in the exchange server.
Called up the exchange server team, purged the queued emails. No other emails were sent/received during this whole episode.
Thanks to Iterables.partition in the present day.3 -
Not a rant but I spent 30 minutes writing a fix for 2 integration tests while screen sharing. Ran the tests and they both pass first try, no exceptions, typos or silly mistakes. 2 additional unrelated tests also started passing. It felt good.2
-
That feeling when you’ve got a reputation of preciseness etc, and the code you just submitted for review has so many silly little mistakes you just want to do that ostrich thing. Gosh, how can I suddenly suck at my job this bad?
Okay, the changes affect EVERYTHING in our codebase (a major change in core business logic), and there is no way I could’ve tested every possible case by myself without a decent coverage of automated tests - which we obviously don’t have. So yet another argument for it (damn management, won’t you listen?!)… but still, some of the mistakes found during code review make me seem like a complete idiot.7 -
Man, making scripts for random shitty tasks is so god damn nice. Like pushing a new version in a repo. Throw together a script to find metadata and kubernetes files and identifies and update versions automatically, then commit, tag and push. Simple script, not even 100 lines of bash, but saves so many silly mistakes.16
-
Ok c++ professionals out there, I need your opinion on this:
I've only written c++ as a hobby and never in a professional capacity. That other day I noticed that we have a new c++ de developer at the office of which my first impression wasn't the greatest. He started off with complaining about having to help people out a lot (which is very odd as he was brought in to support one of our other developers who isn't as well versed in c++). This triggered me slightly and I decided to look into some of the PRs this guy was reviewing (to see what kind of stuff he had to support with and if it warranted his complaints).
It turns out it was the usual beginner mistakes of overusing raw pointers/deletes and things like not using various other STL containers. I noticed a couple of other issues in the PR that I thought should be addressed early in the projects life cycle, such as perhaps introduce a PCH as a lot of system header includes we're sprinkled everywhere to which our new c++ developer replies "what is pch?". I of course reply what it is and it's use, but I still get the impression that he's never heard of this concept. He also had opinions that we should always use shared_ptr as both return and argument types for any public api method that returns or takes a pointer. This is a real-time audio app, so I countered that with "maybe it's not always a good idea as it will introduce overhead due to the number of times certain methods are called and also might introduce ABI compability issues as its a public api.". Essentially my point was "let's be pragmatic and not religiously enforce certain things".
Does this sound alarming to any of you professional c++ developers or am I just being silly here?9 -
When you realize that the solution for a bug in your code is putting
if (somecondition)
but then you put
if (!somecondition) by mistake and try to figure out why is the bug still there :-(1 -
Spent about an hour wondering why my php code was showing in the browser window after submitting a form using Ajax. Found that I had start my php file with just <? And not <?php. Feeling dumb.4
-
- have/share an agenda as soon as possible
- each talking point should identify a problem. Make a list of strategic questions answers to which would make it perfectly clear what and by whom has to be done to resolve them.
- plan meeting duration according to the list of questions. Make sure you meeting room reservation gives you enough time
- take notes
- be prepared for a need for another meeting(s), if during that meeting it comes clear that:
> more/other people need to be engaged
> some things are not clear and need more investigation before going further
> you have run out of time
> there are other problems tgat need to be worked out and it might cobsume too much time to do this in a current meeting
- do not turn the meeting into a chat. It's counter-productive, tiring to the listeners and a waste of time
- do not try to cover many topics. The less, the better. Unless they are very tightly coupled.
- do not invite people you do not need or there is a very slim chance you will need.
- only schedule meetings when the situation needs to be DISCUSSED among multiple parties
- that being said, do not schedule meetings when it's more convenient to communicate otherwise, like email, chat, etc.
- after the meeting make a summary and send it our to all the participants. They might reply and clarify if you have misunderstood smth or missed some important point.
- during the meeting assign tasks to each other. Verbally. Make notes. After the meeting reflect them in jira, rally, wtv.
- while assigning tasks nake sure the assignees have no blockers to work on them and make sure they understand what, when and how should be done. Some tasks might be dependedt on each other, work the sequence out.
- while assigning tasks ask "for ETAs. They might be as silly as 1-hour-to-2-weeks, but they still let you know what to expect.
- offer your assistance to the task assignees if they need any while working on their tasks
- work on your language, grammar, syntax, etc. Reading texts with typos/mistakes is repelling
- be a leader, an authority everyone is looking up to. Not a boss.
- avoid saying NOs. Be more of a "do we really need this; can we do this some other way/time; I can't promise anythibg but I'll see what I can do about it" kind of person. -
Git Commit Part 3:
28d48b0 This is why the cat shouldn't sit on my keyboard.
95df68f I must enjoy torturing myself
c5acfc2 Fix my stupidness
3a57702 I hate this fucking language.
6cb212a Too tired to write descriptive message
292b1e2 That last commit message about silly mistakes pales in comparision to this one
f4a091f Does not work.
5af1ca1 small is a real HTML tag, who knew.
e7d2d84 Best commit ever
f54d32b de-misunderestimating
f587ca1 Added translation.
352e29c Future self, please forgive me and don't hit me with the baseball bat again!
54403a6 Now added delete for real
9f42f38 Who knows...
5df8457 more ignored words
56bd0ef Added missing file in previous commit1 -
Silly mistakes while coding, fuck!!
I wrote a loop:
for(i=0; s[i]!='0'; ++i){
//Code
}
and thinking what's going wrong🤔
.
.
.
After sometime I realized my '\' wasn't pressed 😢😶
And after that:
SILLY ME 😁😁 is only thought in mind....5 -
So I started this morning with 22 emails from an automated system at my university thanking me for signing up for every single fitness class being offered this semester and asking me to fill out a health information form and waiver. (22 emails, one for each course.) Because the semester started last week, and I had added a class (after some drama with the system not behaving correctly at first), I spent a few minutes making sure I had not accidentally signed up for something I had not intended to.
Later in the day, the school sent out an email apologizing for their script which had sent an email for each class to every student on campus. (So each of several thousand students got 22 emails this morning, most of them unnecessary.) To compound the problem (at least in my opinion) they asked the students who should have gotten the message to treat the email barrage as their legitimate notification, and everyone else to ignore the messages. (They should have invalidated all the messages and re-sent the legitimate ones. Never treat erroneous messages as a legitimate notice. Separate the two and do things properly.)
I normally don't get to see my school's IT side looking this incompetent, so my morning was quite amusing. -
Sometimes knowing how to program has this weird effect where you pick apart all tech that has some cross over into your field. I rarely visit a website without seeing something that makes me think, “who the hell thought that was a good idea”.
Lately though, as I learn more about the management side of things, I can see many more reasons that stupid things end up in good products. Lack of time and trying to over-engineering to cater for some odd edge case being the 2 biggest killers.
In 2018 I’m going to be a bit nicer about silly technical mistakes.2 -
"What the f, why isn't this Type or expression recognized?!" you think as you are writing your code.. and then you realize you're not inside a function.
I wonder how many times this has happened.2 -
I don't think today is my day--i'm making alot of silly mistakes: forgot to call callback at end of function, forgot the () to complete the IIFE, copied a SQL querystring and forgot the change the fieldname from 'date' to 'created_at' and wondering why it's returning an empty array.
Self, please get your head in the game -
The moment when u forget to break from a switch statement from its one of its cases and try to figure wtf is wrong with ur code.1
-
Not having a cup of coffee before I do anything. Because I make silly mistakes like posting a rant for wk7
-
Run code
System flag set.
Code crashes
System flag not removed
Fixed code
Code won't rerun because system flag2 -
Damn it! I just spent an hour debugging something and it was due to a copy-paste error.
Copy paste hell. Bah.