When I was in my second semester of college I was tasked with creating a file encrypt/decrypt program. Take in normal textfiles and spit out a new random text and symbols file. I worked on it for two weeks and read up on all different encryption types and stuff. I was so excited when it was done. After it was done compiling I tried it out on its own source code. Encrypto.c and named the output file Encrypto.c 😰 The next thing I did was google " best version control and how to use it."

First day at my first workplace as a dev. waiting for my laptop to load up, nothing happens, black screen. waiting sitting patiently and silently for approx. 20 minutes.

the monitor was off.

The Perfect Storm:

My worst coding mistake? Yeah, let me tell you about that. I pushed a simple JavaScript/HTML change without knowing that the stupid header was shared with another "not so important" section of the site called "My Account" where people go to pay for their services. I call it the perfect storm because I left early that Friday for a weekend cruise and right before leaving I pushed the change, sent the request to push for production and left. When they noticed that clients were complaining about not being able to pay they started reversing most changes of all teams trying to fix it but they never touched mine because they knew I wasn't working on the backend. My whole team worked over the weekend trying to find the issue while I was having fun in the cruise. They ended up reversing all changes by Sunday night and it took us about 4 more days to figure out that my simple JavaScript/HTML change broke the site and prevented 30 million customers from making payments that weekend plus it broke the whole 2nd release of the month.... yeah, nothing major.

Delivered Project to Client (Android App) and forgot to remove a Toast that I used for Debug purposes. "it fucking works!!"

Worst coding mistake would be me dropping an entire table of customer names because I forgot to double check the table name in the script. I felt my soul leave my body.

Last year a random company hired me to develop an Angular app. One of the main requirements was that it needed to be compatible with IE6 cus thats what they were using internally... I accepted the offer...

Worst mistake is having great ideas and never realising them

when I was first started out, I was trying to test out a file delete and renaming program I made. it deleted itself. never even knew how it happened. it was effective in deleting though.

Company website with images path relative to my localhost/
....
so everything work just on my machine .
the client and pm send me emails to fix the sites but I open the url everything works correctly.
after 5 days the pm attach an image .. at that moment I was like 😖😖😖😖😖😖

Worst mistake I've made?

Trying to learn perl.

For about 6 months when I started coding php I didn't think indentation was worth it so all of my files were like
}
}
}
}
}

if (thing = anotherThing)

I think we've all made this mistake at some point..

Force merge develop branch to production >.>

chmod -rf 0777 /*

all men are !equal. Some are programmers. it's beautiful how only a programmer would get this.

pushed an error ajax to production: alert( data + "form not submitted you cunt"); I forgot to remove it. 😂😂

My worst code mistake ever?
About 6 years ago I entered vim.

I was working for a web company as an intern and they had maintained a lot of high profile websites like celeberties, government and radio/tv. I recieve 2 mails with news updates from the clients pretty much at the same time.

One was a formal call for a campaign of one of our biggest clients, and the other was from of our small clients that was into cat breeding.

Since we use our custom cms for all the sites I sucked at multitasking back then - I published the news on the wrong sites so for a good hour i made our high profile client a cat breeder...

Hey @dfox - How about "your worst fuck up" as the topic for the next weekly rant?

Worst coding mistake: forget to remove print statement that prints user authentication details.

Pretty simple oversight in a SQL pull led someone to run about 3,300 background checks that had already been run. Somebody told me we spend $25 per check, which would have totaled around $84,000. It ended up being much less, but for a good 40 minutes I assumed I'd be looking for other work the next day.

My professor asked my to write a method that recursively reversed() a linked list. Wrote an iterative version with the same name and called it in the recursive method. How I felt after she wrote 100 for my presentation...

Student: what are indexes on mysql tables?

Teacher: I don't know, nor do I recommend it's usage.

I once forgot to lock a cronjob, which dispatched queued text messages. Some people received the same message ~five times. I wasted around 4000 EUR in total ... :(

I managed to accidentally clear everybody's usernames and email addresses from an SQL table once. I only recovered it because a few seconds before, I'd opened a tab with all the user data displayed as an HTML table. I quickly copied it into Excel, then a text editor (saving multiple times!), then managed to write a set of queries to paste it all back in place. If I'd refreshed the tab it would have all gone!

; <-- this little fuka

I messed up carelessly in production. Learnt how SQL queries bite you in the ass when it knows you are under pressure.

Was hosting an online quiz kinda thing during my college techfest. Tens of thousands of people participating.

Using MySQL as database and thousands of queries were being executed. Everyone were pretty excited as the event just opened up.

None of the teams could solve one particular level. Turns out the solution was wrong and was asked by the organisers to change the solution for that particular level. Usual stuff, right?

Was too lazy to open up the web UI for the back office and so, straight ahead logged in to the MySQL server and ran the UPDATE query on the table consisting of the solutions.

It had been a couple of hours and the organisers came to me with a weird problem. There were no changes in the scoreboard for the last two hours. Everyone were stuck wherever they were. Weird, right?

I then realized.

Fk.

In that dreaded query, I had only run

UPDATE 'qa' SET answer = 'something'

leaving out the where clause, specifying the question to update, like

WHERE qno=13

As a result, solutions to all the questions were updated to the same answer. After hastily fixing everything back, I had the dreaded conversation.

Org: What was the problem?

Me: It was the cache.

Org: Damn thing. Always messes up.

Me: *sheepishly* yeah

Probably the most embarrassing moment in my life, wrt coding 😑

Tried thinking of worst coding mistake ive made....realized how many there were....shivering...

My first time working with Java and SQL queries(SQL with little/no knowledge): created separate db for each entities and hoped it to work together after the coding was finished.

what a noob!

if (variable == true)
return true;
else return false;

I spent 3 full days trying to debug an error caused by ONE SINGLE SEMICOLON.

The worst mistake I have ever made was working for UK web design agencies.

No appreciation for their staff and honestly the worst working environment I have ever witnessed.

There was a time, I couldn't find what made my webpage to appear blank. I stayed 3 more hours at the office to find the problem. Didn't find anything. The next day, I took a fresh look at my code, and guess what. A semicolon hidden in a JSON array.
Damn you semicolon ! I'll get you someday !

The worst mistake I made was using json files as a simple database.

The project was to be delivered the day before it was even ordered, so I had to take shortcuts.

I totally underestimated the popularity of the project, so all that file reading and writing made the server slow and sluggish. It also being submitted on a shared host, made it even worse.

In the end the host shut it down. I don't recall, but I guess I had to add that database support after all, the project being that popular...

In an application that everyone in production floor used... I made some "improvements"... Next I know I get tons of tickets because is really slow... Like 20 minutes waiting and it doesn't load... I try with my user in their computers and it loads instantly... Puzzled... After trying in many computers my user loads instantly... Oops... I left a if(user = "me") skip all active directory checks 🙄... Made all production floor lose about 3 hours 😆 because I didn't believe 😛

During the first few months of my first professional development role, I had a really odd bug on a live WordPress site that I couldn't replicate locally, despite having the same code and dependency setup. Using WordPress was a mistake but not the one I'm writing about.

I decided to copy live site and its database. Then I thought it best to delete all the users from the copy of the database (I'm not sure why I thought I should do that) and I did so via the WordPress admin UI.

What I wasn't aware of was there was a custom function to email the user before they get deleted.

I got inundated with hundreds of confused/angry/hysterical users about their accounts being deleted, even though they hadn't actually been, and a telling off from the boss.

"UPDATE table SET field = 1"
Neglected to include "WHERE ClientId = XXX"

1800 users loose access to thier software in the middle of the day

Restored in 10 minutes thanks to disaster recovery policy.

I accidentally started a reindex on a collection that had 14 million records in the middle of the day. Caused an outage in a major portion of our applications for about 3 hours. Worst thing was that once I pressed enter, I realized that it was for the production database, and not the staging database like I intended. I immediately went to go tell the dev ops lead, and he basically said, "whelp, let's just sit back and watch the world burn. Not much we can do about it"

Updated a non backed up table in production with no where clause.😭

It took a week to fix it.

Ran a script on production to scrape ~1000 sites continously and update our ~50.000 productions from the data. On the same server as our site was running. Needless to say, with traffic and scraping, our server had almost 100% CPU and ram usage all the time for 2 weeks until I realised my fuckup

that moment when you were still new to git commands and just typed in random commands while thinking of a stupid dog meme saying I have no idea what im doing then accidentally pushing something in prod and had no idea what to do cause the lead dev was not around... aahhh those were the days

made a Facebook app once that allowed users to submit their stories for a competition to win a tablet. The HTML form had no limit on length but ORM defaulted to 1000 characters in database, imagine the sourprise when we exported the data for the client at the end...

client to Freelance programmer : we'll need a website, an android app, an ios app, a windows phone app, a windows desktop application, a Linux app, a mac app, we also want an interactive game version of the app, for learning and tutorials, can you develop all that? *developer : yes. *goes to learn c# : )

Ran a sed find and replace function on project-folder/* instead of targeting a specific file extension. Fun Fact: sed replace will find those character combinations in image files, too. The site looked like you were on mushrooms. Thank goodness for git

about 6 years ago I was working for a large consulting company on a government project. I put in a change for a stored procedure that hard coded the partition to 0, except 0 didn't exist on production, just on test. several thousand government employees couldn't access it for a day. 😞

Wasted 2hrs changing the whole code, later realized I had passed the arguments to the function in wrong order 😑😣

Worst programming mistake I ever made:
rm -rf * in the root directory

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.

Worst mistake is thinking Code Codecademy taught you anything about thinking like a programmer.

private String field;

public void setField(String field) {
field = field;
}

// I was wondering why didn't the value change

worst coding mistake... anything I've done in WordPress

Didn't realize buttons will submit the first form on a page, coded without this assumption, went into production without anyone noticing. Cost the client about 8 grand in work that had to be redone.

Worst mistake ever...

Using PHP to write a server-side utility instead of Python. (Or anything else really, even BASIC...)

while reading rebecca & brain's book on object oriented software. I realised that the programmer is a special kind of person. the complexity he can handle, the struggle to implement a system, from input to output, satellite control, AI, robotics, heck, even the planning required for a simple android app, the complexity is overwhelming at first, then you get your jotter and break it down into parts, and you drive yourself to the edge of sanity figuring out an algorithm, then you go over that edge implementing it, but oh that great super hero feeling when you finally get something to work exactly as specified, I'm not sure people in other professions can understand the satisfaction. I'm very young in the whole programmer world, but I'm growing fast, I'm just really grateful programming found me, I mean, can you think of something else you'lld rather do? yeah, me neither.

my site has a > on it.
I spent 3 weeks finding it.

Forgot the WHERE clause.

That moment when you realize why not even you can properly use your API

it was my first job as an embedded engineer i was hired to write firmware for arm microcontroller that has ble radio. But the microcontroller we used didn't have FLASH it had a SRAM and an otp ( one time programmable) memory. In ble you can make a proximity beacon and When a phone passes by this beacon it will get a notification '<device_name> nearby'
. I thought it is funny if i keep device name 'MILF' (original name of device is FLIP ) so when somebody's phone is in proximity it will have a notification 'MILF nearby'. joke didn't work as nobody has their bluetooth switched on by default ,but i forgot to change it before programming otp memory.

i just buried that device and told everyone it is not working properly

In one big project I made in past (when I was new developer) every ajax call execute code which looks like: dbquery("SELECT * FROM table WHERE something='".$_POST['value']."'");

That project doesn't exist now (thank god)

Sent patient health information in a screenshot of a bug I found, unencrypted, through email. No one thought to mention the test DB had real patient info. 😐

I've spent a few hours trying to fix a bug and wondering why nothing was changing when I refreshed the screen... I was refreshing the live site instead of the local.

People often rant about a missing semicolon,
I added an extra after if condition

if(...);{
}

Compiler can't take this as error.
Debugged the logic for hours,
Wasted a lot of time, lol

I was working on email reporting to business customers and in the test phase was mass sending email to my own account. However it suddenly stopped working and it took me a few minutes to realize I had commented out the hardcoded line with my email address. I had to write to each Customer and apologize for the spam after my error. Also had to get whitelisted our email server after the incident with a few.

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).

Not mine, but a colleague puts a script in production which has to sent an email every time a config changes, but in reality sent an email every time the file was accessed. The system sent a good amount of email in a couple of minutes, the remote SMTP bounced them but the connections on port 25 was dropped by the server, the production firewall hits the maximum number of allowed connections... a lot of shit!

Every one of my private projects "Lets hack together an abomination resembling the finished result and do the boring ground work later".

Accidentally dragged-n-dropped a very important folder into some other folder because of some hiccup when hovering in an Explorer window using remote desktop against our production server. Then left for home. Gotta love GUIs...

Worked on an Android app that synchronized contacts. Didn't consider the contact id may change, leading to (rare) cases of properties being synchronized to the wrong contacts. Only found out later in production when one of my frequent contacts called - and my phone showed a wrong profile picture for him.

the worst mistake, really, was crashing our production not once, but twice in two days, and being too much of a newbie to recognize it was my fault it broke because of my code

I was experimenting with a load test suite called 'Siege' to build and scale increasingly complex searches against our new site search engine. I assumed that an old iMac couldn't have generated a crushing load against the beta servers and I learned two things the day I wrote and started that script before heading to lunch:

1) Beta and Production shared MSSQL instances
2) That single iMac was more than enough to take the whole production site down...

Worst coding mistake I've made. Not learning designing patterns

Trying to learn C and thought a easy file copy was a good start. The program read the size of the file, reserved that size in memory, can copied data there and then to the new file. For some reason I never thought that the file might be bigger then available memory... Took a couple of BSOD to find that "bug".

Manually updated a user who was attending a focus group's password by resetting it to a known hash...

Forgot the "WHERE user_id" part of the SQL.

I used Visual Basic.

Develop an application on Windows that will be run on a Linux Server. Strange bugs occur on server but not in dev environment.

The worst mistake was i installed visual studio and xamarin to make android apps

My biggest mistake was that I didn't check the file extension of a uploaded file. Or more correctly forgot that I turned it off for debugging and pushed the app to production.

Somebody noticed an uploaded a hacker php script and got access to all the files on the server. Including some semi sensetive clients information.

A talk with the client that followed was not a pleasant one

Forgetting that damn semi colon!!!!!!!

I do some robotics stuff on the side. We built our robot around a Raspberry Pi last year. We had 2 Python scripts talking over TCP, one for the bot, one for the controller. Overflowed the buffer on the bot and it went berserk once the script crashed.

Checking for a hardcoded password and submitting User and password in a hidden Input each time.

Didn't know about Sessions back then

Forgetting .show() in toast and debugging for hours trying to find an undone error....

json.dump writing as json.dumps and json.loads as json.load.
just Python thing

worst mistake? plausible
I just chose _system_ as my username, I got a feeling it will be a prime target in a case of database intrusion :/

I once sent a test message mail to a list full of over 500 customers instead of the actual test list on mailchimp! :p

After one month of coding on Internship (doing website and app for them), I accidentally deleted folder with all code from my MacBook.
God bless disk recovery tools!

When I started ssh'ing into remote linux machines I would wonder why a lot of the programs I started wouldn't keep running after I logged out... :facepalm:

The elusive if (i = 10) in C. Took me about 4 hours to figure out why my if statement was always true.

Deleted 1000 lines of code that I would need at a later point. Had a mini heart attack once I found out the code was no longer there...

At a previous job I had, there was a bug in the payment code, we did not know anything was wrong until the customer support team began receiving some crazy emails stating that our company emptied their bank account. Then we investigated further and thousands of customers had their banks emptied. So the payment team went big hunting, found the problem to eliminate further chaos.

Unfortunately the person responsible for this huge screw up was not fired immediately, but did resign soon there after.

Worst mistake would be instead of selecting and deleting file contents, deleted whole code folder which i wrote in 3 days.

Huge mistake on a customer billing procedure.
That procedure was generating a file for automatic billing requests from our customer bank to his customers banks.
That procedure was shifting the bank coordinates by one byte right making all payment requests invalid and rejected.
That month the customer got nothing from invoices (more or less 80k euros).
Side note; only one payment was accepted because the guy entering the invoice on the system shifted the bank coordinates by mistake, so the procedure fixed it.

:/

Worst mistake I have made is accidentally wiping a database table by messing up a SQL script. This was caught after it had been deployed to around 30 customer sites, most of which had no technical staff on site, and we didn't have remote access to. I bought our support team cookies for fixing that one.

Updated a lotus notes task not knowing that it would execute when saved. Emailed 3k people.

A script to run overnight SQL backups, a colleague updated the DB blindly, corrupted most of the data, when checking the backups there was a typo in the script so they were all 0kb in size!

Luckily I had taken a manual one the day before...

git push -f

accidentally merged staging with master :-/

Worst coding mistake was copying data from a live site to a sandbox site. Data was 1 year old and it's a magazine site.
Accidentally restored year old data to live site. Rolling back all content to a year back.
Thankfully I had a backup that fixed the issue.

I updated all the records about 1000+ because I forgot to write the where clause with the update query and it updated every fucking single row with same values.
~God bless backups :)

Used a wrong filter during loading of a table in ETL. Did not test and migrated to production. 80% of users had empty reports.
Had to stay awake till 4AM to get it fixed.
Realized an important lesson -

' A test in time saves nine'

"Oh this is such a minor thing - I'll just fix it directly in production". The actual coding mistake was the kind that you make lot's of every day, but the unwarranted confidence was a bigger one :)

Not my worst but spent a few mins confused by this today:

private String str;

public myConstructor(String str){
str = this.str;
}

My worst mistake was to have localhost phpmyadmin up, and beside the production one. I ran DROP on production instead of localhost. That was not a nice feeling when I realised 😐

All I want to say: ";"

Using vim without plug-in and writing my first ever python code (not "hello world") on it
Hail emacs!

Quickly delete a double record in the production database with a script, just forgot the where statement...

Oooh I have quite a few,
My favourite: accidently left a log. Debug("bollocks") in a try catch this made it through testing and does (still) occasionally go into production log files.

Worst: wrote an interceptor for jboss with the intent of checking cache for some lookup data. I picked the wrong one of two similarly named methods and instead queried the database, I effectively wrote a denial of service utility into our app

writing Apache directives in my .gitignore instead of .htaccess file

This one was from my Tech Lead, She had to update phone number of a customer in Database on production server. And guess what she forgot 'WHERE'. Next we were facing each other with poker face. :|

p.s: fortunately we had backup of just 4 hours back. Still we lost data of about 100 people.

wk8 responses so far have been WEAK.
Most of them follow the format:

I did <some minor mistake> but fortunately I was able to <make a quick fix> within <short period of time> so everything turned out ok.

Come on guys, where are the REAL fuck ups? The ones that got you fired/permanently banned from the company?

My worst coding mistake

In my last project for the distributed application programming, I was working on encryption for messaging between two users, the mistake was after decrypting the message you should trim it, and I was trimming before which made the message corrupt, this mistake costed me 2 weeks of delay since I couldn't find the problem, the code was like this
Message=decrypt(message.trim());
Where it was supposed to be
Message=decrypt(message).trim();

I remember seeing:

$arr = [];

$arr->prop = 'new property';

Must use ASP.NET and an old jQuery mobile version to build an "app".

The worst programming mistake I ever did was a using if($true =0) instead of if($true==0) for a betting platform. Due to the assignment operator fault it meant that everyone won irrespective of if they had lost the bet. But thank God I identified the glitch within 5 minutes though it caused quite a damage.

Accidentally avoiding all collision detection...

I do repent this one
Using an IDE

Starting a team project in Rails without even knowing Ruby.

I thought that it won't be too different from other frameworks and I would learn it in 2 days or so. I was so wrong...

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...

About a decade ago I built a force download script, to get the browser to download the script instead of trying to open it in a new window (eg pdf), all you had to do was pass in the location of the file and it would download it regardless. i didnt put any restrictions in place, so you could download all the server files etc!!! Needless to say i fixed it ASAP

i accidentally ran the migrations and got lucky it failed. lost the blog table but client had the backups. could have lost the whole database.

I can't decide which is worse

I changed the wrong if statement accidentally sent out 15k emails to a clients customers.

Or

Imported a dump of the database instead of take a dump while a colleague was on site training the client on their software.... But found a flaw in our server backups.

Pushed out a big update that included restructuring every directory. No one had access to the admin section. Yeah needless to say my boss was not happy since no one could do any work. Turned out during the process I made every admin page need the highest level of authorization which only the owner has. Easy fix but stressful day for sure

worst mistake?

rm -rf /var

I was about a year into working for this small marketing company as the only developer. I was still pretty new to development, my first real gig, 2006'ish.

Form processing was still a struggle for me, so my really cool idea was to use an open sourced tool that would create and process any type of contact form, (think wufoo, but on your own server)

Anyway it was working great, then a few months later we decided to move all 30 of or our small clients to a new server, I moved everything over and deleted the old site (didn't make a backup of any DB (who does that?) got a call the next morning that none of our contact forms were working and nobody had any info stored from previous contacts.

Spent the next 2 weeks getting really good at php. We never did that again.

I was just setting up a Website, and after a few hours oft work, it was done and working absolutely fine. So proudly I presented it to my customer, who then said something like: "Okay, but why is there all this weird serif font thing without any graphics going on?"
I searched the whole code of the page and the CSS, haven't found any mistake. all the files were also where they should be. After more than a week and a few mails form an unhappy customer, I found the problem by accident: I just used the folder name "assts" instead oft "assets".
Since then, I always note which file or folder I rename.

I was writing a simple algorithm to simulate gravity. But when I tested it it produced wildly wrong results. I looked over my whole algorithm trying to find the error, but thought that the last bit, the final position update, must be fine.
I was wrong, some misplaced brackets were accidentally multiplying the position + 0.5 by the sum of the old & new velocity instead of adding the position to 0.5 those velocities.

I noticed that and fixed it, and now it runs pretty well.

I have forgot to store time on mysql database in UTC format, now i have to rebuild lots of application code. Damn...

Worse coding mistake was a typo when I first started. it was on a arcade site I made and as long as you had the users email the typo made it where you didn't need the password to login to an account. luckily it was a free arcade I made to learn from

Had a php float value that I needed to use as a string, so I typecasted it.
Later on in the code I need the value again but now it was a string.

Typecasted it back to a floating point.

My colleague almost killed me when he found out what caused the miscalculations.

Worst coding mistake: accidentally overwriting part of the address field in an Ethernet frame instead of the vlan tag when developing a network switch...

on live server

me: these root server files have loose permissions.

sudo chmod -rf 644 /*

me: well... 'cd' works, but nothing else.

Kind of a coding error. My git status was full of files I haven't committed, and I wanted to clear it.

I took a guess and thought 'git clean' would do the job. Stupidly I was in my documents directory, and I then said goodbye to all my documents... r.i.p.

Mine are just super obvious, stupid things like: having your content blocked by adblock and freaking out since you cant see it. Pushing to the wrong server and not realizing why your pages arent showing up.

NullPointerExecption...

I wrote a stored procedure and declared the input as varchar instead of varchar(100). everything seemed to be working. later on we noticed that the procedure only saved the first character of the input (a user form). unfortunately we found out first when the monthly form reports where issued. a whole month of incomplete forms from our users. the client wasn't happy.

My worst mistake was to not follow the commit process one time. I was multitasking a lot and forgot to run the tests for one of the commits I made. Next thing I know the whole Dev team started complaining that the Head of the branch was all messed up and blaming me. Long story short, it wasn't my change but I had to take the bullet and revert it for not following the process. It was deserved. Process is just as important as writing the code.

I needed to implement user authentication on an android app during ny internship. It always authenticated and ran code for not authenticated user. Turned out I wrote else instead of an if else.

not me, but my co-workers left del logging active for about 6 months, then one day it became severely slow for finding free filenames to save into.
mine is DROP DATABASE in prod, after that i have been like I will never keep open console to prod

The makefile:
'
GOPATH=$(pwd)

clean:
@echo "cleaning :)"
@rm -rf $(GPATH)/bin
'
the "oh crap":

make clean

worked on a couple projects at work for a week. Forgot to back them up to the svn. The time comes to show my boss what I've done and the files are gone. woops.

I once wrote some files for a small game I was developing in C at 6am to turn in, problem was it was mainly built in Java as per directions.

My worst mistake (though it did help catch a bug which was cool) was not checking that my merge was done properly (we were using a terrible CM tool at the time and you had to merge manually). I had checked in some code that would, among other things, scale an image to a custom window space. I had missed one line of the code I had written to properly calculate the image bounds on window resize. As a result, whenever you would scale the window, the image dimensions would change erratically and screw up other behaviors based on image size. It shipped that way.

Probably not worst but back when I was in graduate school I used '=' instead of '.equals()' for a string, by mistake. My professor was so pissed and taunted in front of whole class about how dumb people are here without taking any names(btw I didn't realize that guy was me until later) and gave me a low score

I told her later it really doesn't matter if I used either because '=' worked just fine in my case. She was a little more pissed after knowing that I wasn't wrong. 😜

What does wk8 stand for? Seeing the tag all around here... ^_^

When someone calls me VincentNwonah and expects me to answer. but I'm a programmer and VincentNwonah is a different object from NwonahVincent. ;p

2 weeks into my industrial placement year during University I was tasked with writing a rhel .rpm file to install our software.

Within this script contained rm -rf ... you can see where this is going, right?

Well this command was meant to delete a local usr/bin folder during the cleanup, and it did! But I must have accidentally changed something, and instead of staying local, it bounced to /. Goodbye usr/bin. Goodbye 2 weeks worth of progress. Hello angry infrastructure team...

Okay one of my stupid mistakes (yep I had multiple...)

I had a client running a WordPress, some older people that don't know that much about computers. They created the whole content for their WordPress, but it was a very large one with a lot of pictures they struggled to place etc.

And 4 months later I get an email saying that the hosting of my domain has been deleted. And as I was too lazy to place their database on their hosting, I placed it on mine. It followed up by a complete data loss and I couldn't tell them....

Not proud of this, but I told them their server had crashed and I couldn't do anything about it.

They closed their business because of this.

I feel bad.

Mixing tabs and spaces in python for loops. Took a while to find out what was wrong :/

worst mistake was probably introducing an infinite loop in the category tree for e-commerce site...

in the vein of true agile and considering MVPs and what not we had not yet automated everything. the client would send category updates as a spreadsheet and i had a script to generate the sql and jam it into the site. having run the script several times in the past I thought I'd just throw the update into production and call it a weekend...

it wasn't long before I started fielding calls that the site was unstable. no page would load and the server kept crashing under trivial load. well an entire frantic weekend later I discovered the category load hit an edge case I hadn't considered and I had introduced an infinite loop in the navigation of the site.

i'd like to say I learned my lesson and never just threw changes into production again, but what can I say - I like living on the edge. I did however learn that loop detection can be a valuable thibg

actually it wasn't mine. But it affected me. So we had a project website on wordpress and wanted to rewrite the theme. everything went well to the Point of production. Site is fine locally, at testing and on stage. On production we still see old, a bit broken old version, but only on homepage. Wtf. Nothing helped. After couple of hours later we found out, that the admin was updating php version and he left html shot at production, which was taking over.

use a mutable obj as hashmap key and the hash code changes when obj got updated. evey text book told u this is a stupid bug and impossible to debug, and I spend a week to prove u can debug it out when in single thread app

Was trying to figure out the seemingly unending line of scripts that call scripts scripts and I commented out the core functionality of a job in production. Stayed their for weeks. The script in question? Validates that correct data is loading from an etl job.

Updating AMPPS on mac and removed my hole dev folder ... can't restore it.

the worst code is when I stop code after reaching this. but does happen often. 😥

$fml: rm /* -R

Instead of /devtemp/*

Yes it was a crazy recovery!

iprogram, does this make me an apple product? : )

most commonly. ...missing the simicolons ;

coding.

A bug on a chef script which stops the web server in case if it was unable to talk with the database. One night the database hits the maximum number of allowed connection and a good number of web servers went down at 3 am.

I've just discovered I tried to call a status_header(404) after a content load on... An unreasonable number of pages. Which should have all just included back to 1 page anyway instead.

update visual studio 😭 or android studio 😞