Spooky Coding Horror Stories 2023 - Part 2

to query it's hilarious because they have to try to decipher. Are you trying To sneak 1 by me and spell something out on your license plate that I don't know. So it's this, like, like, in

detection, you know? And like, there's lots of tools out there that will I don't know if I believe that That's like Amazon. All this crap is just a bunch of lies, bro. Bunch of lies. I guess you probably have a story about that. I do. But They're super handy. And I also put them on my whiteboard in our kitchen and I hang my keys on it. And it's like the best little hook to hang keys on. You can move it around and Put them on the side of the and

every single record into memory and loop over them. You know, rid. Not the early days, but in the mid days, the feeling of dread when I would occasionally misplace that computer in my apartment was true horror. So I asked him,

like I'm not sure if the regex was in the query or if the regex was somewhere, but the production database one. We had a weird setup where we needed to connect the fraud because

48 hours.

I'm on fire.

rid. You can't do that just in the DB. So it probably had My own.

It probably was something weird where

yeah, you're right about that. My my,

So I got these 100 pound ones And it's 9 megs, and we have 600 episodes.

I I think that is an important important thing that we all can learn from each other's mistakes. We can laugh at these things. It is a unifying

celebrate those mistakes in a fun fun, laugh y way where we all get to cringe together. So, yeah, That's it for this year's horror stories.

So I literally am holding up like a I don't know. It's probably a 15

somebody else had another account on that computer as well, but that's rid. That's unlikely.

2 2 different climbers who are doing several different alpine climbs as well as Himalayan climbs, but they're rid. Trying to break the records to see how fast they can do them. And some of these climbs like the

And my biggest complaint is that the magnet on it's weak, so it doesn't you know, it's not you can't, like, trust it if you're using it as a pop Socket, which the PopSocket branded ones actually do have a stronger magnet. So,

come on, make this like, I want to be able to pry this thing off. I want to be able to pinch my finger in between it.

computer folder. Would be gone. All of your apps, all of your data, All of your set like, pretty much the entire computer unless

And the amplifier

Thank you, everybody, for submitting your spooky stories. If you Still have a spooky story. A lot of the ones we have here are from last year. People submitted them after listening to this thing. So send me an email, [email protected],

are, like, historically And the announcement was made, I double checked my code and spotted a bug. Rid If if you had any brains,

And, you know, with any of these things, you kinda have these wild kind of personalities. So the people involved in this documentary are super good. It's an hour 30, so it's a really nice nice watch. We put it on last night and had a great time watching it. So if you see this on Netflix, throw it on race to the summit. Alright. Thanks everybody for tuning in. Hopefully, you have a spooky

But, like, hey.

You know, what do they say? You know, people who know the History Channel, I wrote the algorithm

pound bar. It says a £100.

They get knocked off all the time. I hate One of my biggest pet peeves in life is a weak magnet where things don't stay on properly. You know,

And I will put them in the queue for next year. We love doing this, so please send us your horror story.

I have all these attachments that I need. I got handles, I got bars, I asked him if it was time consuming or expensive, and he said rid It's being used legitimately like, that's wild.

This one is about speed climbers, Rid. Yeah. That is, served

And or it could have been an urge for prevent riling. Either way, there was not an ounce of waterproofing done to these speakers, and it said they were 300 watts.

don't repeat the History Channel. You know what I mean? So, rid

rid He's, like, walking around. I mean, there's 2 different guys. They're both crazy. Walking around corners really fast, and you're just thinking, man, I couldn't even you couldn't even catch me rid Walking around a corner, like, 30 feet up that looks like this. And he's Wow. On the side of a mountain, and he's basically, like, running around it. You're just like, rid. This is absurd.

Yeah. If anything, The world can learn from your mistakes, So So hits a day or something like that.

The whole rack that I have is metal. So I bought these a 100 pound. They sell really cheap ones, like 25 pound ones.

rid. It's not even close to the product that it says it is.

really crappy kind of, I was a newbie navigating the tech jungle.

documentary

like, straight up lies, You know? And you can straight up lies. Yeah. Sometimes you see one with, like, like, like, the magnet hooks, and you'll see one for £105.

And I'll say, I don't think those are good for they have 15 seconds of your compute running, and they can do

Oh, A weekend later, our office got hit by real world thieves 6 people got absolutely They say not the pharmacy. For all you new folks, CVS is a, version control system that's not Git.

It is the mountain climbing, mountaineering documentary. You know I love those.

and It's about, like, But then we had to do some extra work to make sure the shortened URLs that didn't contain profanity.

Amazon story is that I got a a waterproof speaker that was 300 watts on Amazon, was actually served

Yeah. I know.

rid. This one is really fascinating because it's

I I googled the board. The amplifier was 40 watts. It was a 40 watt board. And And it's just like I went to Amazon. I was like, listen. This is just completely misleading. It's, like, it's not that it stopped working. I don't care about that. Yeah. I mean, I do. But, like, after updating the DNS, I immediately got on the train and had no signal.

Rid. I've been using it for 2 things. So first, in the gym,

Very scary climbs that, like, take people a long time, and these guys are doing it in, like, a couple of hours. And is he's like, this section has ropes, but, like, If I really wanna move Rid Do do push notifications cost money? I don't know if they do. I guess it that's a good question. I don't think they do. I think it's just SMS. I could be wrong because I I don't work that much in push notifications. Frankly, I find them to be awful. I think it depends if you have your own push notification

aspect of being a software developer.

rid. And it's exactly my type of documentary.

else? Other like bands and things like that. And you need to be able to store them somewhere. Right. And if you break it That is crazy.

So much of that Amazon stuff are just,

Halloween.

Or drop a review if you like this show.

Rid Woof. Yeah. If you were to do that on a Mac, And For some reason, my boss was chill the entire time our podcast was a couple of hours late Customers had their credit cards in, Rid As I'm talking through how it works and what happens when a sale goes live. So I just kinda explain, alright, you turn this thing on and off, and this is what happens if a sale goes live. All of a sudden, I get a handful of push notifications So causing an error message containing the database credentials to be displayed on the website's home page. Rid Yikes. It can you imagine

100 pound magnetic hooks.

what and or

fridge as well. So if you are looking for decent

for a full archive of all of our shows.

Rid.

Yeah. Right.

and, you can have a little chuckle. I think that's the key of this. This isn't just us laughing at other people's misfortune,

wow.

Spooky spooky stories, all that stuff. My bones are rattling. I'm ready to get out of here. West, do you have a sick pick for us today? I do. My sick pick is

and they are awesome.

Head on over to syntax.fm okay. Next one is It wasn't user data, though, But a dataset to train AI So the they just have a segment where they're reading rejected plates from various places. Butt of everything. That's such a good plate, chicken butt. There's so many worst ones in the out west. There are

And don't forget to subscribe in your podcast player running up the mountain to the point where, like, there there's times where

just like any of these other, like, really modern mountaineering documentaries, this is a 2003 one. It's called Race to the Summit. Just like any of these modern one, your jaw's just kind of on the floor the whole time.

magnetic hooks, check these out. Yeah. At first, I laughed at your weak magnet thing, but then, like, as I was thinking about it, I bought, like, this, like, magnet based pop socket competitor.

thing. Like, it has to download the firmware, The next DB backup was at 12. Oh.

whenever you you hear an alert of, like, iPhones are being bricked or this is being bricked, The first thing I do is think about all those poor devs. Whoever

put it on itself, and then reboot itself. Like, what happens uncontactable? just because of how Bad. These are but they're cringey laughs. They're they're laughs that come from a deep place of Yeah. I also I spent all morning going through these, and I'm so stressed out right now just from, like, Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.

or some sort of hardware

whoever pushed out the software that's bricking hardware.

can you oh, that's sweaty moms doing that kind of stuff. Hardware is another level. Yeah. I know. Whenever it's like Rid. I charged credit cards and updated balances within the same database transaction, And I was putting sales

So it's a good lesson both for entertainment as well as

my wife just texted me, is Dracula in your office? Good. I nailed it then. You were really loud. In fact, I had my headphones turned up, and you started that intro so loudly that I, like, and almost shot the earbuds out of my ear.

This is our live That

annual as he thought he had copied the address checking your credit card and but then also refunded.

rid Coding horror stories. So every year, we ask people to submit their, on a Friday afternoon, like 15 bundles of toilet paper to somebody's And that causes the HTTPS how much bandwidth

episode.

You're listening to Syntax, the podcast with the tastiest web development treats out there. Strap yourself in and get ready. Here is Scott Talinski and Wes Bos.

on customers websites with their tech, with their database. It's just awful stuff.

rid Spooky coding horror stories

So these are stories that make you want to put your head in the sand. Stories of

offered to resign, and he said no. Yeah. We've all been there. Rid. You know what? If you haven't taken down prod at some point in your career Next one. I accidentally

Afterwards, I found out that I had missed a semicolon and crashed prod

You know what I it was? I

And it was doing

I made the redirects. I was like, these aren't working. I was like, oh, it's because we're not you. I had Cloudflare plus 1. So you can imagine, like like, Netlify gray clouded because we weren't using any of the other Cloudflare features. We were going straight to Purcell. Okay. So I was like, oh, we need it on. So I flipped it on and I tested the website and immediately the website broke. And I was like, I know what this is. You got to like I lots of bed hooks. However, that wasn't my fault. Someone made the test

Fm so that if we ever change podcast providers, they don't want anything ever accidentally happening where you possibly

was using Cloudflare to do the syntax meetup URLs.

And something happened there with the SSL,

ticketing company.

But I had That could fix npm when it fell over. So this one was submitted anonymously, thing,

these companies do. Just rid Parsing RSS feeds must be unreal. Yeah. It's not like we're the only podcast with 600 episodes. Oh, there's a lot that are are much larger. All right. This next one again, I'm keeping them anonymous, but this guy works for a very large The client's tech wizard son who served as the project's reviewer and administrator just because Is this a misspelled bad word?

Podcast feed doesn't get paginated. There's no spec for that. So you think about because

Quickly

Spotify wouldn't pick it up, but literally, like, 3 minutes later, it popped up in our feed on Spotify. So rid. I got, license plates.

the redirect loop.

from going out, I was worried that threw a Cloudflare rule on there that says if it's the feed, change the SSL, the flexible, literally shipped, like, Or and also is it like a new slang that I have not yet heard of? And It's hilarious. If you go on the Ontario website, you can look at the list of denied plates, You're like, yeah. Right. Rid

the CloudFlare default is like flexible SSL,

and Schmuck here, but Yeah. Slow rid At that point, you know? And, like, hopefully, there's a recovery mode, but then you got support telling people how to do recovery mode. But if they're rid. If you can't get into recovery mode or you need to do some weird, like, USB stick But one of our offerings was so called synthetic tests, basically a way to ensure all inside of a batch job with retry logic.

and that it fixed it right away. But

Spotify downloads our RSS feed and caused easily $20,000

rid. Yeah. You did. With DNS or what?

Probably every 5 minutes. Right.

failed to remember that we also host we don't host it, but we proxy the RSS feed

I took down Are you a real dub? Instant Tax podcast feed some sort of multiple

So, like, even 10% of the country at at at a minimum.

I I've never never used anything other than rid That is, Yeah. And the last thing you wanna do is have to get on The phone and do chargebacks for all that stuff are oh my gosh. Yeah. I swear I didn't order $10 worth of one thing over and over again.

Double.

it makes these even more like, oh,

concurrent

rid Versions Yeah. Totally. Oh.

CVS, by the way, stands for

Next one we have here is called Lorem Sale. Okay. So this one time back in the day, I was showing a new dev around a dev instance on a website we had built and managed For massive national airline. I love how people have to redact. And it's kind of funny because the people that emailed it to me, if you look at Where they've worked in the past, Oof. That those are the worst bugs where orders had been shipped to the customers,

the site also ran Company's APIs. It was a Drupal monolith. The site is basically a sales funny funnel for the company's separate booking engine site. Rid There was a feature where you could put a sale entity live, and it would push a notification to all of the company's double digit percentage Of the national population.

systems. Concurrent version system. Concurrent versions system.

what does WordPress use? SVN? That's the big one. Subversion was the big one before Git. A lot of people still use that. And then I know, like, Google and Facebook have Rid. I I don't wanna be a a century,

their own versions of it because it's much bigger than Git can even handle.

dollar sign out aggregation

Then

Did you know like, cotton ball material in there that they were probably just hoping would suck up some water. I have no idea.

I didn't. Not the 1st time I used it. I cleared 80,000,000 records in one swift move with 0 backup. No. Stop.

like, sit there for 3 seconds or 15 seconds.

That Mongo's

hit a URL User so we didn't have the problem anymore.

anywhere. Even if you let somebody

stage clears the collection you're saving too.

in a specific way, but also it could be used nefariously. And it's always Bitcoin miners. If you let somebody run code

Well, in the background of his website was a Bitcoin miner

on 1 weekend and quickly had to add some detection

Nefarious things with that compute. Yeah. Bitcoin miners are like, it's like life. They will find a way. Right?

due to this exploit

That's That's a good start. What a good hook, this person. This is a person who's, like, writing a story.

I didn't I accidentally implemented an infinite redirect loop that sent a 110,000

Oh, please. 80,000,000 records With no backup, if you got 8,000,000 records,

that took me months to build and recover.

rid To fix the exploits as well as we could simply not turn off the feature altogether.

rid so you think every time someone, like, sends a PR and they say LGTM, they said, let's get this money, like like, that's slang for deploy the sucker? rid A piece of JavaScript somewhere that people load up a chat, and every 5 seconds,

I'm very embarrassed to admit that, and I feel really dumb. So rid Alright. This next one, I think, might be the best one. I'm gonna let you read it, but, like Oh, yeah. Buckle up. Maybe if you're driving, pull over. This is a big one.

I read it as let's get this money, which mistake. Is that is that a 1000000 dollar company? We've had a lot of expensive mistakes on these spooky stories. Dollar mistake. But that one is

Big Brother bug. In my early career, mid 2000, my 1st week on the job as a software dev Was for a local big brother production.

And I honestly I'm having that moment too. Extremely red in the face right now. I wish y'all could see because,

This money.

Yeah. Like, what? This is this is our product. It's going live. I I've I'm, like, I'm having a moment of, like, I'm so stupid right now. So this is my spooky story.

So every single time I've read LGTM, the button,

It makes so much more sense as looks good to me. That is hilarious. So when I first saw this in this context, I was like, oh, that's so that's even, For a whole hour, losing 1,000 of euros.

Every winner receives a small prize. All of the data was already randomly generated in an XML So whenever the computer crashes

Things down, you have no idea why. Then I found a single line regex was bottlenecking and was pretty happy about it. However, come Sunday, However many times you you really think you have everything dialed in, Everybody makes mistakes, and it's important to really

All queries.

prizes all day

It's like the one, like, nostalgic thing I have about Tim Hortons. But,

you you do, like, a fake role. During COVID, they nixed it. Now they have an app so they can track you and rid. Oh, stuff is awful.

or they take a break or they reload the app, the index will be reset to 0, And all the previously won prizes will appear again. So the customer is handing there's something like Valuable stories to be learned here. Yeah. These stories will make you wish that you had some brains. Right?

expression in a condition

didn't.

rid. You know, And they have rid. Stupidly moved it to some app based that

was goofed up, And literally So, yeah, that happened. We changed all the rights of the database

for a customer to use in public places such as malls.

like, for every one of these stories, people will tell me there's probably 10 more that people will never they're tight lipped about.

the parentheses in the wrong spot

3 years ago, I did a major release, pushed hundreds of commits from Staging to production after extensive testing.

hour. I borked a logical rid Both. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Next one, web chat DDoS. I'm a front end At a company that does software for customer service many years ago is working on a prototyping web chat feature. Once it seems rid. Once it seems stable enough, we would let our customers put chat on their websites. That's when we realized our code was now loaded onto a lot more computers than our main app, And it was making way too many calls to our server. Basically, we were DDoSing ourselves with our new web chat product. We took it down as soon as we could, but it was already loaded on a bunch of pages that were still hammering us. So like, I imagine

The site went down for 3 days. Oh. I had no idea what went wrong Like a needle in the haystack. I mean, that's the worst feeling. Right? and, it stopped working. And when I opened it up, obviously, the thing's full of water. There there's no waterproofing in it. In fact, the only waterproofing

Probably Like, how much do you win at Big Brother? Isn't it like $1,000,000 You may have heard actually the Hasty before this, but this is the tasty full of No, people. Man.

rid. For some credit card processing Next one.

and, they had to, like, claw them back because they were accidentally,

Rid. If you're not if you're not following along, an if statement Next one, a $20,000 As

Oh,

everything. It would be very interesting for somebody to tell tally up the amount of dollars lost over every one of these stories.

And, turns out I pushed to prod, and then I went to get into a submarine to visit the Titanic.

ready.

he, quotes, fixed it. And I threw a a classic LGTM, Welcome to Syntax.

All of these stories we are keeping anonymous whether the person has asked or not

On Twitter about how he made a mistake and sent $60,000 At one point, all these people were winning. I think, like, I think it was a car or something significant, you know, like rid. 1,000 of dollars of prize at TV, to the wrong wallet How how many times You are pushing an update to ecobee rid. Have we heard this where someone says, I did something $1,000. No. Not $40,000.

Also, I thought LGTM

I don't want them to see the light of day, but we don't want to put anyone's name on these because if you tweeted it, you can delete the tweet. But if it's on this podcast, you can't delete the podcast. So rid we own the URL.

always test your code.

let's

looks good to me, and it was deployed.

A few hours later, 1 angry customer made a huge thread

some of the best ones are anonymous because they're total redirect loop.

Rid Oh, we patched the fix, and the company paid him after all the buzz. TLDR it turns out, the ops guy had refreshed in air quotes,

Where it didn't alert the user that the copied value was actually copied,

stood for

thank you everybody for submitting. The first one is a crypto copy paste horror story. I worked for a crypto company in 2020. And while building the React Native app, one of my colleagues made a PR to solve a small

LGTM.

rid To the right place. The UI showed that it has copied successfully, but it wasn't for some specific Android phones.

copy to clipboard issue

It would look pretty cool. Be cool. Like on brand. What's his name on Twitter? I forgot his name right now. He has no

Yeah. Really, really Honey, we have, like, new black and white license plates that are really slick in Colorado because the other ones are, like, green with mountains on them.

And I was like, that I've never found one that's $300 funny. You know? Like, it's gotta be

When it came to making my 1st change to my code base, my boss mentioned I needed to commit my changes to CVS.

drowning in too soon, and the data was gone. And, you you know, people Keep all sorts of stuff in their, home directories.

with shouting, and we had to write an apology email to all 20,000 users.

who swiped our servers. Oh, no.

users with the wrong username and password. Basically, Excel I don't know. I I don't wanna be, if I cut somebody off. I'm a pretty good driver, I I think, but Every now and then, you make the wrong You don't want to do that easily. Yeah. You identify the wrong person mad. You know? Maybe I would guess something funny, but every time I look at it, it's, like, $300.

import rid had a 1 row shift. The client was not happy. We had a terrible meeting How come there's only 6 laptops in the world that could fix NPM if it fell over? And he said there was So you just flip it to full strict SSL and it fixes everything.

off-site backups. Man, off-site backups are a thing.

JS. That's a custom Iowa plate.

and didn't say anything to me. Everybody on Twitter replied to that, like veteran.

Oh my gosh.

You know? He's seen it all. Next one, dodged it.

CVS confusion. I had a light bulb moment.

I'll forever be the code savior who spared our code from literally being robbed.

But I I thought of, like, a black and white one that says syntax. It's the perfect amount of characters. Our license plates are 6 characters.

Instead of the most popular house guest was leaving.

break. That's like AWS going down without, you know, being a hosting thing. I wrote a large application performance management software similar to Century.

configured lots of synthetic tests to hit his website

came back to find lots of the AWS alerts on high cost. Rid. Turns out a trial customer

that are not available in some browsers.

Their website works when accessed all over the world. A customer can configure a URL and optionally some JavaScript to click a few buttons. And if not nothing breaks, it test rid. Passes. We would then periodically run these tests on all our machines all over the globe, which we had hosted on AWS. If The test would fail. The customer would get an alert. Everything was fine until 1 weekend when a team DB query

So I was unaware that people were trying to contact me about it being offline. Now this is a service folks, if you don't know about polyfill dye, this is a service that people are regularly hitting. So It being just straight up down for 2 hours.

and stay there for some seconds.

As

30,000,000 I think, like, Next underscore Rid. In 2007, the author, who was 15 at the time, worked as a freelancer,

Someone from the marketing team was going to demo this and Slacked us About our prank, And

I know you can't read it on air, but you get the idea.

k, capital m,

So he sent us a screenshot a while later, we made a is this the same person? I gotta ask. Yeah. Because they say a while later. Submitted too. I chopped it in. No. That's great. This is a double dose then.

Capital f, capital u, lowercase c, capital That one's actually good for the user for a change. All of these ones, like, They they cause havoc to the user, but this one, hey. Free prizes. I'm pretty sure in in Canada, we had

none of us knew what he meant.

Yeah. I think that's Gotta be a concern with any random generated word. You think about, like, the name generator on Heroku, Timing, they say, is everything.

of the URL even being done like, there's no there's not even a gasket or a seal around the plastic, which, You know, you can't tell from just looking at it. So when I opened it up, I was like, alright. There's not even a gasket here. And the only bit of waterproofing was, like, quota was, like, a It was like a, you can't put that one back in the bag. There's no one due for that. Undo a 100 and like, yeah. What do you do? You're just gonna have to swipe them away or whatever rid Oh, man. Even I I was curious. I looked it up. A 110,000 Long. Yeah. A lot of big winners that day. Hey.

Oh my gosh. And I'm I'm I'm seeing the next one right now, and I'm already in tears looking at part of the next one. So okay. Rid. The this one is a a URL shortener.

Fortunately, this only happened to someone at our company and not to a customer during a demo.

Good for this person. A while later, we made a URL shortening service to our URL.

that the app had generated for him. The URL was and then there was a URL shortener forward slash, This wasn't a prank. It was actually randomly generated.

I'm gonna let you, spell that out yourself, but it is beep me.

A while later

push notifications

from the company's sales app 1,000,000

A few points of policy were developed.

cost?

Put it off live then on again.

push notifications.

Anyways, showing the dev around, I put a sale live. Keep talking.

push notifications

with the dummy data in production.

Oh, yeah. How much is sending a 1,000,000

rid. Dev with prod without changing the DB connection script back to the dev DB. So the dev site was connected to the production database,

Call incoming.

there's a podcast I listen to. It's like an Australian comedy podcast, Bunta Vista, and, This is great. Okay.

game of trying to figure out,

dynamically generated Just I you know, imagine, like, the amount of Stress you're under in that amount of time. I've I've I've had some sleepless nights where I'm up coding trying to fix a bug myself. Yeah. And there's really not a whole lot. Like, You know, your your partner can be like, hey. You doing okay? Is everything okay? No. It's not okay. I'm Could be

Ontario puts out a list of I got a support email saying they couldn't access the site anymore. Rid. Turns out our dev DB was named

Got to put a profanity filter on that.

Oh, yes. And get

That is, like, a segment of 1 of theirs is reading rejected plates.

rejected personalized roll up The Rim, which is Tim Hortons. You roll the rim up and you see if you win, like, a doughnut or a car or something like that.

they get so rough, and it is very funny. Have you ever considered getting a personalized license plate? I have

Dinos, or anytime you have, like, I became an office hero, sans cape. I'll never Rid Little did I know our CVS server held our entire code base.

US. Pounds. You're right. Oh my gosh. I I, like, I recoil reading these. This is This is simultaneously

I think, like, 100 orders got through. Our traffic wasn't super high.

I dropped the analytics database for the past 6 months.

Oh, that's wrong. Next one. So I accidentally turned on a feature before it was ready. Nobody noticed for 4 days. By the time we did, forty rid.

There were there was a big meeting with the business people to be made aware about it, and the higher ups were basically like, well,

That's that might be the 1st $1,000,000

let's just see how it Hands out and see if these people contact us. Oh, no. That's not right. That's not the right thing. I think all but 4 of those orders activated, And it was our highest conversion month. I like to brag that my bugs are run of you revenue generators. Oh my gosh.

you know that, did you watch that TV show on Netflix, The $1,000,000 menu.

It took another week to notice that nothing we can do about it. 40,000 people just got a whole bunch of free stuff. A few days later, I was fine. The total cost of the company was £700,000.

The thing is the right thing to do is to refund everybody without them having to contact you. That's

my favorite episode of the year because I feel like it's the most laughs per second,

£13,000. That's a $1,000,000

That that's right there. Holy cow. $700,000.

40,000

I have so much tension in my body reading these. Alright. On the on the 1st week of my internship,

Unfortunately, this error was indexed by search engines during a maintenance window, exposing sensitive credentials in search results.

removed exception handling rid Handling.

is off by 1. Is off by 1, so I get, like, diapers.net.

We had that one with toilet paper a couple of years ago. Somebody

Netlify had has a load balancer, and every single request They get in for westboss.com emails depending on, like, what they're sending. But if you're a medium sized company,

Rid Oh, This podcast is presented by Century. So thanks. Let's get into these spooky stories. Wes, you wanna hit that first one? Yes. This one is wild. So, by the way, we should say It's like oh, there's a $1,000,000 man million pound menu.

inadvertently choking

So yeah. Broke everything, and people thought Every site had been hacked or discontinued for a day or so. I was ex was extremely confusing as it wasn't a simple index lookup. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. And, also, you know, you give people somebody else's anything,

You know? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Diapers.net.

sites index for food.com Data phase.

the wrong traffic domain

it just started showing up. When product actually arrives at random people's houses, that is just that's hilarious to me. It's unfortunately hilarious, especially if it's large amounts of things like toilet paper.

and, like, that that that hurts customer trust pretty badly. Right? Yeah. No kidding.

is a platform as a service. I don't this probably wasn't Netlify. I don't know I don't know who submitted it, but imagine RSS would be so scary to me. Like, imagine rid. Push notifications

removed

random house, and for a company that running. So basically, he used our AWS machines to mine bit

Next one. I once made an off by 1 error writing a high efficiency load balancer for a platform as a service

and developed a web store for a local music company.

yeah. There was a I I know this isn't the same thing, but there was, like, a thing with, like, Steam, the gaming platform, Where they have, like, a similar issue that was serving up the wrong cache to the wrong user, and it was a similar bug, I believe.

Food.com Broke out in a cold sweat, on Netflix, After correcting it and running the code again, the results

rid to your phone or text messages. That's a mess. That's

Next 1, 1st commit at a new company brought down the entire site, to customers saying Lauren Sale is now live.

retry logic that kept retrying.

seeing that is in someone's

emails to a group of about So all domains I have a sick pick that is a with the exact time when people can win. And I was saving the index to the last 1 item into a shared object, which is like local storage or cookies these days. But the problem is is that you need to call Flash for the data to persist on the hard drive, which I obviously Let's move our code base to GitHub.

under all of that. You also can't That one like dropping a database. Yeah, we've heard it. But like we're customers.

Rid. Oh, man.

charged dozens of times until they eventually hit their credit limit. Created a terrible mess, But a few critical learnings to

Buried under a mountain of email. Oh, man. That is and if they host their own, Still one of my worst mistakes.

It was $100 and just sending emails.

$10 worth of charges run up. Yeah. No. Thank you.

rid. And I had just boarded a plane for a cross country flight.

rid 6 users causing their IT department to think they were under attack.

For a voting platform before for a breakdance competition,

where judges' votes were tallied and then put through a thing, and it would reveal the winner. And the 1st time they used it was in, like, a,

Luckily, it was fine. So, yeah. So many of these stories, the stakes are so high and they have to do with

A battle in South Korea. And I remember, like, thinking to myself,

People's lives or a significant amount of money.

the bug was, you know, when you're trying to, like, find a percentage or something and

So next one. For 2 years, I had one of the 6 laptops Rid. We, I actually strongly opposed Happened at 11:57.

it is easy to have that flip flop happen. I wonder everyone must have been outraged with the that I I wrote myself. I wrote That's crazy.

rid. SSH keys on those computers that were not backed up anywhere anything that you would be.

for security purposes.

but from somebody who was a major player at npm in the

I am so pooched if this messes up. Rid.

you have to, like, take 1 minus that percentage, I bet rid. I bet that was the bug. That bug. Yes. Because when you're working with percentages, This happened about 10 years ago, Rid. They they must another weird thing, like, talking about RSS for a second, is that

remix, Next. Js, Gatsby, all these frameworks, For you to explicitly someone rejects a piece of text and that text was not

keys. Could be

I mean, some people put, like, sites and stuff. The entire computer is in tilde.

Your secrets to GitHub. I mean, this is like I mean, GitHub's permanent. You can just, like, GitHub, change your seat, but to have it indexed by search engines. That's why it is so hard to My 1st web dev gig set in the heart of downtown Vancouver.

complied with this demand. Subsequently, the author never had any further contact with the client. Oh, that sucks. Bro. Oh, that's not even funny. That's sad. That's sad. You know what sucks about that is, like I mean, you think about the horror of committing

you have to explicitly put them in To make say, yes. I want this to be on the client side. Yeah. It's the same concept as behind it's pinging an endpoint to rid. Say, hey. Are there new messages? Are the new messages? Are the new messages? So even if you take it down, that JavaScript is still running 1,000,000

r m hyphen r f till date forward slash. Till date forward slash for those of you who don't know, it's the home directory.

Demanding a refund equivalent to the amount paid for the freelance work. Regrettably,

dangerously set inner HTML or whatever. It's like, We're putting these words here or putting this extra step in here so that you think about it. Just so you you think about it. Rid. Alright. Next one here. I just put a note here. I've heard this story You'd be using [email protected]

Despite The Sun's responsibility

Rid. That's the root of the hard drive. Oh, the So No. Till day till day isn't the root of the hard drive. Forward slash is the root. Sorry. It's the root of the user. Rid. Yeah. You're a user home. Yeah. And especially if you have, like, a droplet or something, I never put anything in my user directory. But I know what I'm saying is I know some people put a lot of stuff in their user rid. And on a, like, a Mac computer, there's a lot of stuff on your user directory, including system files. But yeah.

The temp directory

leak,

but before it did, rid. But before it did, I pressed enter

especially with these, like, full stack. You're not sure if your back end or front end, into your template, you have to prefix it with

was supposed to autocomplete, to leave the house was announced.

due to their youth fear and lack of knowledge of their rights, the author rid

put an environmental variable

for the issue, the client unfairly held the author accountable,

a several times over the years, and this is This is a cautionary tale. I wasn't sure if this was an author's note or a West Boss note. So this is a West Boss note. That's a West Boss note. Yeah. This is a cautionary tale. A few years back, I SSH'd into a prod server. And when trying to delete a temp directory, I accidentally executed

coupon voucher site because they have, like, an interface for swapping them, and I accidentally rid Swapped them myself. I fixed it, and I put it back to where it was. Oh, yeah? But that is easier than you might expect, so I feel for you. This is from a past guest. You'll know who this is because of of the website, but past guest on the show. Yeah. Oh, from the website.

I wanna say, I I also feel like, Did not sleep for 48 hours straight trying to look for the issue. It was a different time and place. Rid Man. Man. Yeah.

polyfill dot I o. There's your hand. I got 1 digit incorrect and took it completely offline for 2 hours.

accidentally having

Yes. Okay. When updating the DNS for, Next one here. Back in the day, I created an augmented reality game in Flash AS 3, that's ActionScript 3,

That dev to production thing, I accidentally did that with PlanetScale

when we did our rid Sites index for anything.

You know what? You know, we've given some of these scores in the past. Rid. Now I'm going to be giving this, like, the golden the golden spider award for their being the the spookiest story I've ever seen. Oh. Oh my gosh. Brutal. You know what? I guarantee

I won't say what country. Big brother is in the, the TV show. Right? So is a TV show where people are in house, and it's a competition reality show in case you haven't heard of Big Brother.

if you win? Oh, so this is glad that this one is anonymous because

The contestant

I was Tasked with writing an algorithm for that week's house vote.

and the auditor checked the results, But instead, they put their payment info in, then got redirected to the final rid Confirmation stage without them manually confirming.

as the votes were tallied

I kept this to myself for years.

And the person announced as the loser was actually the winner.

The previous week's winner had a percentage, and Big Brother, the production team, had their own percentage.

The logic was intricate. Something like The public had a percentage of the vote determined by,

and then walked on stage to hand the envelope to the presenter.

That is

I still think about the butterfly effect it would have caused

Essentially, lowercase e.

I had night sweats for months.

I can only laugh about it now. Oh. Oh, man. Oh. Like like that's My boss gave the knob. He was planning to make this move for years now but did not have the experience himself.

He wrote down the name of the loser

flipped, get myself. So, shout out to all of you folks who have had to deal with non Git version control. Whether it's Mercurial And

As it was the number one show in quite a number of countries.

a very rough situation.

text message count. The house contestants had a percentage.

before they click the buy now CTA.

that's that's spooky.

the very first thing that should be done on that action to submit the payment should be to disable

It was a full purchase flow. And near the end, they put their payment info in, but there were some other steps for them to manually Click a button where they would actually make the purchase.

Oh, the dread. The feeling of dread. Both both losing it, but also somebody getting their hands on that. You know? Yeah. You'd have to know what you had, but still, Re Buckle up, strap yourself in, and get ready.

Yeah. That is, fast, I, you know, I I don't wanna use the ropes. I wanna do this entirely without ropes. So not only is he doing the scariest climb of all time, he's doing it Without ropes entirely and basically

Alright. Next one. I once implemented a useEffect

especially if you're you're working in some sort of click, but I guess this might have been outside of that. So, rid Okay. I once implement implemented a useEffect wrong and was auto submitting user payments before they clicked the buy now CTA.

Rid. Dear gosh. Auto submitting payments. Here's another case. When when, just just for those of you out there, if you're working rid. Ever with a payment system, and before I read the rest of this, and you do have an action to submit a payment,

wrong and was auto submitting users' payments before they could submit

rid a query and what the query is that is slow.

test form point to live.

debugging was near impossible.

Brutal. And then somebody followed up, said, didn't you have a bunch of medical equipment delivered to a customer At one point, and he says, yes,

But, yeah, you certainly should have some tooling around telling you when rid. I've got and there's so many good ones on there. Speaking of that,

Next one. Accidentally truncated your entire at feed syntax.

In somebody's browser and pinging them. So it goes on to say, I'm sure there were people it was smooth.

We we see kind of the same

drop the database. Accidentally charge a 1000000000 people. It's, like, so funny how the these same patterns in in I mean, in software.

they have Rid I sent an email to 20,000 Crazy.

Dear gosh.

stories over and over again in a in a different way. Right? Accidental DDoS, rid I'm gonna return it because it stinks.

he gotta make a backup somewhere.

out there with a bunch tabs open in Chrome, not realizing it was making a bunch of people sweat in a conference room somewhere.

6,000 notifications

and software in the US

without any remote control solution, Caution stories of people totally dropping the ball

boss had to ask a cousin living there to travel

myself to that, shipped hundreds of kiosk hardware We lost $50,000 rid. It not being available means people's entire applications

5,000,

From France Like a good chunk of the Internet. It's like things polyfill.

rid. Like, 6:6 hours or so, and it was just constant. My phone battery was dead. Oh, okay. Yeah.

service or not. Of problems. Like, if Clari is doing I mean, something this large has their own infrastructure.

Hokey. Yeah. Yeah. Hokey is right. If you get a Hokey out of West, That's one hokey. Oak. That's that's pretty important. Yeah. Hokey. There might even be a couple hokey doodles in here. Yeah. We get into hokey doodle territory. You know you know it's serious biz.

that's wild. Like yeah. What what does that do? When I sold my stickers, like, rid. Mail servers, like, they're probably many times.

to find out. So another

and check rid For a crash computers and to manually reboot it.

Rid I wrote a bug that sent an SMS to a customer of my client And we took 3 hours to track your errors and exceptions. Because when these types of spooky situations pop up, You wanna make sure that you have a, well, a non spooky pal to help you out solving those issues. So head on over to century. Io.

2,000 plus times in the loop, Okay. Next one. While at a booking engine company, I made a change on prod with no staging or Git back then just as the boss walked in for a meeting.

massive amount of notifications. Although, As we just mentioned, I think SMS, this one's gonna be quite a bit more expensive. Holy cow. Imagine getting 2,000

dev_ indicating a sale went live. Ugh. Client of damages in a few hours by making everything free.

dev. Dev was actually production.

Rid. Example. So SQL injection is like Oh. That is it for today.

2nd week on the job was testing SQL injection attacks on our dev site.

and and you're like, what's your name? And you say my name is drop DB dev. So he typed in, like, semicolon t equals t drop d v dev.

you have like an input and then I became totally Io to polyfill APIs

I was trying to build a view with just the data I needed, And I dropped the source data instead of the view. Honestly, I blame them for giving the intern full access to the database. Yeah. Right. You are. Yeah. Don't give the intern The ability to drop it. Yeah.