Web Dev HORROR Stories + Spooky Trivia! (Spooky Stories Pt. 1)

that day. Just imagine,

flash. It was a hack.

it's stuff like this Wes Oh, I Does that make you happy? Yeah. Oh, I can tell you I'm getting really hot in this hammerhead shark costume. My wife's always talking about natural fibers.

I type in my master password.

With macromedia

has Deno. Man, I am hot in this shark costume.

if I'm on, let's say,

That you you tried to make it sound like that's actually something, but, $5 worth of stuff and then went back in and bought $5 worth of stuff and just kept doing it until they stopped us, and it just went to the next one. And I got, like, maybe, like, a $102,100 dollars worth of, like, deodorant and chips and all this hilarious stuff. And I just I feel bad now looking back. Like, some poor guy pushed that coupon out on a Friday afternoon. It was a Friday and just went home for the day, and then they

function.

of these spooky show of despair.

and you get a discount, and everybody gets a discount. I work for a large company that offered multiple subscription based products, man. These

We were having issues with PayPal and Visa. So for around a little over a month, I'd get different requirements and conditions for Wes, did you hear something? Yes. Who's here? or higher,

it's true. An empty object is truthy, folks.

It's about to be. I'll tell you that. That's about to be.

We will catch you on Wednesday with a full hour

the server.

on Riverside, and I couldn't get it to load. Man, I I think I missed that whole outage. All I saw was everybody talking about it. I think I was just happily doing my local dev and didn't see a thing about it, but,

Major difference there. A five minute old MySQL dump on my laptop.

and I clicked the big red drop that database

and people, like, freak out.

JS a result, a semicolon at the very beginning of the HTML for every website before the HTML tag, most browsers completely ignored it. Yeah. Browsers are super forgiving about mail form markup. But, of course, IE threw a fit about it. Fortunately, it ended up being an easy fix. We figured out what was going on. I am forever grateful. I don't get nightmares from having to support Internet empire.

Since every time a new payment method was added, the norm had been touch as little as possible.

but there was one, wasn't there? There was, like, a weird IE

Oh, man.

Peace. Just kidding. It's just a costume. I didn't get eaten. Oh, yeah. I was gonna ask that. You actually recorded that song? Like, that didn't sound like AI. That was really good. Would you like to hear it again? It folks, this song Wes not AI. I recorded this myself. You play it. I'm gonna grab a drink. One sec. Okay.

Very, But I think it's hard to come in these stories. Not just unbelievable that gets through, but unbelievable that that gets through and and gets put on the shoulders of a six month old higher. That's a a process failure right there.

and on probably next year, we'll read it. But we collect them all year round, and and we read them off once every year. So I'm excited to get ESLint it. How are you doing today, Scott?

Didn't affect any of my stuff. It might have affected syntax dot f m. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely did. We're hosted on Vercel, which is hosted on AWS.

Meanwhile, one of my vacationing coworkers messaged me the waiting room.

You all have to tell me, is this a real browser hack, or did I make it up? IE float double margin fix. When you float an element in IE, it doubles the margin.

So we went around to every it was called pharma plus, like a like a like a CVS in Canada. Yeah. We went around to every pharma plus because you're we're a college student, and we have more money than brains or sorry, more time than money in in brains. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And we just we went to every single one and bought Yep. It's being pulled in. What's up, everybody? now I know how it works. It's very real.

markup. I I had a back in back in the day, I had an old HTML site that had, like, in in the FE. What is the FE? What why am I blanking?

This was

Within minutes, the site was back online.

in that FSM is accounted for, and we see and document everything is working and we test as far as we can test. See, there was another little thing. We couldn't complete payments with this new method because there was a test API for that method, and it never made it into the documentation.

not local. I had just deleted the entire production database.

Wes seemed like a major outage.

plenty of them. It's called discount. You get a discount, It's wild that so many of these stories are people that don't have automated backups in place. They don't have any sort of guardrails where you can just YOLO Pnpm my admin in production. At the very least, change the background of that production. Pnpm might end in to be, like, red or something. If you're gonna have scary because Wes says fake. CJ. I'm gonna say fake too. Oh, events collapsing. Yeah. Okay. Good.

Spooky my headache.

some some some poor person is, like, now, like, getting the heat of the whole company because of that, even though it's like a Yeah. Like, you know, insignificant little thing. Right? Well, at least we can you give us a laugh. Many of these stories people send us years years later after they've the PTSD of the event

if you got a npm package with 2,000,000 monthly installs, you are certainly being targeted.

at the very

It was a browser hack. A browser hack.

this is that that's not the the that's not the real or fake part. IE actually does that. So if you do float left and then margin left, it will do 40 pixels.

Please let him be dressed up. Yay, Erg, ladies. Woah.

of spooky web developer stories where we found real So I prepared for you a soul sucking game where we have eight browser hacks.

The star and the underscore hacks. You can use the star or the underscore to target specific browsers because, Yes. We all know that these things pop up all the time, and it can simply make us scream.

That's true. Very yeah. That's that's deep.

CJ,

Okay. How many how many, shaking bones do you give this one? But, yeah, that was me singing everything.

end tax.

and you can do so with, like, the best tools in the entire world. And I say that as somebody who uses these tools every single day. So shout out to Century,

go out before they realize it's

By the way, these fangs are digging into my lip, and I'm gonna have, like Awful. Actual poke marks in my lip when I'm not I gotta take this off. Folks. That's not makeup.

you should especially your one Password recovery codes or, like, your your password manager recovery codes, you need

The conditions were also fairly complicated

that's okay.

us living in a place where your bed stops working submitted yours, please go to syntax.fm/spooky, chance. No chance.

and they have committed a crime.

and then I sought to my surprise. It was a hack.

Steve and I couldn't find a single soul Node if it starts with a million, that bumps it up in that, The conditional tree was an absolute mess I try to breathe deeply while looking at Jenkins, feeling those fifteen minutes stretch out over an eternity. I reach out Oh my gosh. To another beer, and split second, I crack the beer open.

Wes says fake. See, CJ, what do you what say you? I mean, this seems really useful. Like, maybe it existed somewhere and then didn't become a standard. I'm just I'm I'm gonna say real. Real.

costumes.

which payment method should be available My soul left my body. I had been logged into production,

as my first job out of college, and it's had its own proprietary CMS ecommerce platform, the class of LAMP stack. I was a jack of all trades doing all the technical stuff from programming the front end design work to database and server administration. We hosted hundreds

that's a that's a scary situation.

Oh, I see. I see. That's fine.

spooky bats.

I opened phpMyAdmin, suddenly stopped authenticating me. You know, face ID fails, and it asked for the master password.

giving anybody random people access We look at it. Can we can we solve that for a second?

guilty. Keep in mind, I was still under six months probation

Remember those days? Wes nothing. Everyone's just FTP ing and working in production. You're just YOLO winning all.

Real.

I create the PR. We change one Boolean from false to true. Steve quietly approves.

Next one we have here, just a patch. When I started web development, I did not know everything about how SQL patches were made. There were a few requests that I worked on. Bugs and new features worked fine for me, and then I was asked to patch it up to prod. I had new tables and some extra columns on existing tables, so I thought it would patch it all up at once. So I generated a script for every

I don't know if you've scrolled,

Literally, a semicolon

Hell, yeah. I'm sure, I said confidently.

It is, of course, real.

It goes Yep. You gotta do that. And thank you for joining us for, The company I was working for at the time was releasing to a new market. With a new market comes new payment options. Of course, we wanted to allow every single payment method in every single county. Right? So we had multiple conditions to build our final list of available payment methods for each

I don't think it's a real hack. I say no. CJ says fake. It is fake. Yes.

Okay. My this is real all the time. My I old IE knowledge is immaculate, and these are these are very much real. I've very much written many of those in my career.

button and got the classic warning, are you sure you want to do this?

With macromedia

we found a coupon. In Canada, we had this website called red flag deals. And anytime there was a pricing error or a coupon or a good deal, it would go up on that website, and people would just destroy it. So we had this one that was $5 off $5.

of shame How many spooky, with many functions scattered through the utils file, some of which add one line in them to call yet another function. Bro, we have all been there.

the move in,

It was like being locked out of your own house with a butler telling me the key that I've used every day for five years is the wrong one. I eventually had to give up. I started the soul crushing process of resetting every single password for every account I own. Oh my god. In the end, I managed to reset every single account except for NPM. Due to their security policy, an account cannot be recovered without the two FA codes or the recovery codes. They tell you to save those recovery codes for a reason. Wes. Yeah. Do you save your recovery Node? Yes. Like, there's man, boys and ghouls, Oh, man. We both had to sit there a postmortem I I I suppose it would, be whatever, the progressive fallback there.

Hard coded that the customer is validated. Fine. Sure. They're all validated.

a creepy sight, for my code was working with no reason why, and then I sought to my surprise. It was a hack.

stories.

I leaned back, took a deep breath, and told my coworkers I hit I think I just heard a doorbell.

Oh, I believe I also have some booty to be plundering.

YOLO some script. Like, at least run it, pull your day if it's if your database database is not so big, pull it locally and just run it just just to check. Or or Yeah. Or a lot of, like, ORMs will have, like,

The vampires never forget.

Oh, CTO means business.

The customer validation guys are still testing their code, so we can't use the forced response API again. We go, screw it, and we hard Node the whole thing. Fifteen minutes to deploy the code again to the staging server. We look at it. We see it's working. We harass both of our teams This was

No. No. Yeah. Of course.

Well, you can.

They're like, took down their entire empire.

scary situations that the real developers found themselves into.

the moment that you make code changes and then all of a sudden in the actual payments window, you see a flat line, but it it goes on and on. So, you think we should just read this in its entirety? Yeah. Oh, five trumps. Yeah. I I'm gonna give this,

my computer was frozen for a second. Hello. Hello. How are you how are you doing? CJ, what about you? What say you? Okay. I didn't hear what Wes said. He said a lot. I'm gonna say fake just because the colon in the syntax

Do we both get to guess? You both have to guess.

I that is like the people who don't know, if you work in payment processing

a creepy sight for my code was working with no reason why,

Yeah. That was me doing everything. I did one take on all the vocals,

One day, our phones started ringing off the hook with a bunch of customers saying their websites weren't coming us. For us in the office, though, the sites were coming up fine. There was an utter dread for maybe half an hour, which felt like an eternity as we were struggling to figure out what was going on. Eventually, we determined that it was affecting

Who's here?

on a server we rented. This was before the cloud was big, and it was obvious from my comment about the LAMP stack. Yes. So many of these these horror stories come from just shoddy traffic and that much payment,

Boss drags us all into the party lounge. Get in here, boys.

That is when I realized what I did. Fortunately, there was a fresh DB backup, and it was fixed immediately. Man,

it. Word.

We used it for everything, browsing tables, running queries, breaking things accidentally, you name it. Oh, Wes of the days of Pnpm my myadmin. PHP myadmin is like the OG Sass. You know? OG Sass. If or not the OG Sass. The OG, like, CMS. CMS back end. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. CJ, what say you? everything's fine now. Nobody ever knew how close we came to digital extinction

Oh my goodness. That is so good. Alright. Just tweeted it out. Let me get it. You your title says at

This is the first fork in the validation tree, and if the customer was not validated, no payment method JS, available.

Yes. It JS. It's spooky For the next show, I read them all to make sure they were all good. Is it worth it? Is it worth it? Sure. Let's do it. Yep. Alright. Well, this is a true story. If it's too long, we'll cut it out.

The margin co I made that up. Margin collapse fix. This prevents IE six from collapsing margins, PHP back end, MySQL database, And in the spooky time of year, anything can happen, so I've invited our friend CJ over for a bit of trick or treat.

Sometimes I forget about that. It was a different life. That that is very good. I don't have any sort of talent like that.

using the expression

It was a browser hack. A browser hack.

you

but they're firm. There is nothing they can do on their end to help me recover the account. Is that serious, one Password?

unbelievable

blood curdling, bone chilling

Margin collapse fix. Margin collapse is a thing, HTML five boilerplate. You had it and it added those conditional classes to

seems like that'd be part of the process. It's real. Woah. Woah. Okay. Yep. Here's the CSS tricks article for it. Pnpm hacks from I six. I think this article is from, like, 2009 or so, and this is a blast from the past for sure. Alright. The comment float fix. This stops IE five Mac from double float margins because it forced the parser into a phantom quirks neutral mode. Wes.

Oh,

No auto tune, folks. I was just singing it. So I'll tell I'll tell you what, man. The makeup, it's a little tough. All those all the all the things are a little tough. I gotta use this. I spent all morning doing the makeup. I'm just rubbing it on my head and then trying to blend it, and then I would add too much black. And then it's like what you learn is that it's hard to go back when you add too much black to the mix. So then you're like stories.

We looked at each other at this and say at the same time, screw it. We yanked out the whole component, gutted the so called conditional tree. We burned the utils file to the ground, and we added tests when there were none. Days of pair programming, blood, sweat, and tears, and all that's left is to confirm in the staging server.

My brain was still trying to process it when the CTO Bos out laughing and leaves. Steve looks at me. We are so fired. We cheer with our beers as the deployment finishes. We drink and celebrate our own little party as the payment transaction curves go up.

It is real.

Flatline.

Do you just casually have a pirate costume? I hear something else.

failure that I'm 100%

Is it did you read this one already?

Table does not exist. Query fail. Everything is on fire.

He was a newer hire than I was. During the whole thing, no one else could really help us since every single senior there was too busy with some other part of the new market release. It was a whole company effort of the miracle releasing to a new market in a couple of weeks instead of months.

people people are are piling in. Welcome, everybody. So we do this episode every single year where we do spooky development stories. These are stories that make you want to stick your hammerhead if you have that much

Okay. Weird typo. Try it again. Denied. Little Scott forms in my stomach. The next day, I try it on my Mac. Same thing. Now I'm officially locked out. I'm thinking, okay. Don't panic. I'll just contact support,

Like, Abercrombie had a had a major pricing error maybe about six months ago. And I'm still not sure if it was a pricing error or if it was just like a intentional,

One fine day, I decided to refresh my local database with a copy from production.

my boss was relaxed about it and understood that mistakes happen. When I eventually left the company Yarn later, I got a postcard with the actual Oprah, you get a car meme as a goodbye gift.

That's a spooky story in itself. Speaking of spooky stories,

My task was to implement a discount feature in the CMS so that a content editor could add discounts to a product. Everything was tested and deployed to production without a hitch. Until twelve hours later, someone discovered that each and every product

Maybe.

Yeah. One thing I always laugh about is when people are, like, The first browser hack, the backslash nine trick.

and brace yourself, Pnpm MyAdmin in production.

makes me wonder if this guy's if something else spooky is going on. You Node? Like, the guy's computer has been compromised because, like, everybody right now wants to get ahold of npm packages. And one with 2,000,000 Mhmm. But, floated. So I'm gonna say

Yes.

something funky is is being put in between

And here's the kicker.

Oh,

image transform Microsoft alpha image loader.

you can this blog post is really interesting. Apparently, it worked really well. It was just slow as hell. So, people didn't use it.

for this Wes just a first taste,

in the ground,

it's that spooky time of year.

Oh, I am simply dead. I I could not,

bats do you give this one? That one's more of, like, a a sad one. I'm gonna get that four out of seven

It really saved my ass. A browser hack.

you do not have We only had each other to rely on, so we pair coded most of it. Just to add some spice to my life, the requirements kept changing.

later that month to get scolded on how many millions exactly the company lost in this hiccup.

So the fix would be throwing display in line to fix it.

Apparently, Out.

Okay. So

you and the sign in there. I think think that's what's happening. Yes. Yikes. This was very specific. Us the name of it because yeah. That's that's odd.

I can. CJ cannot. Yeah. Oh, it's alright. I if you need to be CJ? Yeah. I can hear you, Scott. I will tell you when you should talk. Wes says this is a real hack. CJ, what do you say?

It's sometimes you see

very common. And and I are you one of those people? Sometimes I see the dry run option, and I'm like, it's all good. I got this.

Click. Two seconds later, and our Slack and Sentry exploded

my home assistant the other day, I needed to, like, update it.

After investigating further, I eventually realized I had accidentally saved a semicolon real.

There's so many of these stories where people just

go outside a new version of macOS, something might now always work the right way. I was on, like, Helium browser, and my Reddit login didn't work for two days. But I didn't change the password. I just tried it again in two days, and it worked. Sanity

But it sounds like this was such a big one that there was no rolling back, and you could only

You can write JavaScript inside of CSS to extend CSS's capabilities No. Source project for billions of downloads Node orphaned because of a password I thought I knew.

places

I banged my head on the table a couple of times. I know, I say carefully.

of a CSS property.

It is, of course, real. For those of you who never worked in IE, this magic actually worked, and we used it all the time for various stuff. Even,

object in the database

Oh.

these, like like, pricing errors, This is very much real.

the the, like, hygiene

Even for, like,

only fix forward.

don't wear plastic, folks. This is so hot. Oh, yeah. For JS Nation, we wore space costumes, and they were like it was like literally wearing plastic bags. I was just absolutely

Yeah. Well, I I've been there as well. Even just, Five trumps out of five.

No. We'll we'll keep rolling, but let's at least wrap the episode. Wes, thank you folks for joining us on this first

Front end? No. Front end.

Yeah. But, also, like, props to 1Password for not but the the code you have is that's that's not real. This is that's fake.

Miraculously, Let's grab the first Node. PHP like, banners that said, JS and CSS,

and then and on top of it, I gotta wear glasses. So I'm doing the whole thing. I look like this, which is arguably a bit better. But when you put the glasses on, it's hilarious.

get the hell off this browser.

Maybe you should check the,

the HTML element.

But,

Okay.

I'm on my phone, and 1Password

and six one. Maybe.

well thought out test suite covering all of these, which it doesn't sound like they did.

That's scary, but also, like, Steve, confused, just staring at me. I open the front end Node, and it dawns onto him. Crap.

I think we're live.

We check, double check, triple check every situation, every country, every possibility So, who knew about it.

please the perfect place to fix all of your, don't drink and deploy.

has not been changed in five years.

that helps you get your deploys down to be as fast as possible,

The part that felt like ESLint from a horror movie, they told me, sir, we can confirm from our logs that your master password that that I lose my spot because this one's so long. Okay. We hit a couple of simple problems. First, we couldn't properly validate test customers, so we set it to manual. We use a forced response that had to be configured in certain test API.

Yeah. I know. Solid DevOps.

Give yourself a round of applause, of which I was super proud of. For a long time, I was the only dev behind it until a few months ago. I even wrote in with a potluck question about how to start sharing ownership. I do remember that.

That's fake.

What? another they were a spirit.

but it's now it's a

I believe it's real. I saw Wes saying a whole bunch of stuff, but, yeah, I've I've used this in the past. It's real.

particular customer. That check was done in Time was running out. This was Wednesday morning. We had to push to code because it was held just to figure out what the conditions for the requirement sheets were already added and correct or not. Steve and I decided to refactor the whole thing.

given that Amazon

Alright. Number three.

I look at Steve. He's as pale as a ghost. I'm as pale as a ghost. Hand shaking. We go to the logs and try to find an inkling of a clue what the crap is going on. There are no errors. Nothing crashing. We dig deeper. We enable debug in production knowing full well we might just crash a couple of services. We see a bunch of logs. Customer not validated. Exiting out.

pnpm. I feel a hand on my shoulder. I look up, and I nearly gagged. It was our CTO.

So what you wanna do is head on over to century.i0/syntax.

Six month and a a less than six month old higher.

Oh,

I actually went down a rabbit hole several years ago to figure out, like, how did that actually work? To me, it was magic at the time that it figured out how to just punch out all the alpha pixels of a PNG, That's fine. That's a spooky story in itself.

FE

CJ, Wes says real. What say you? Oh, don't tell myself. I I now believe the syntax can be anything, so I'm gonna say real too.

in the sun, so I I'm having a great time today, in fact, This is Wes, I give this one a good seven,

spooky stories, real or fake. You guys like Halloween way too much. Like, not not too much, but, like, such such impressive

flash. Oh my gosh. It really saved my ass. A browser hack.

spend a few hours going back and forth with one password support team, I feel like you're just typing in that password a little bit wrong, don't you? Did that, like try see if caps lock was on maybe?

around being safe with production

On my very first job, we had a state of the art tech stack,

our users below a certain version of Internet Explorer.

for for presenting this podcast.

At some point, me and my partner in crime, Steve, couldn't tell if the new payment method was showing or not under the correct conditions Gentlemen, I bring the laptop to the party because my name was on the production of deployment, so I was ready to be on call, monitoring certain channels, error logs for at least two hours. Steve brings his laptop. We grab a couple of beers and split the task of monitoring. We sip our beers. We laugh. We talk about how crazy Owl JS, and we bask in the light of how much we managed to simplify that code. Then, oh, we see the curve showing payments transaction activity.

some booty to be plundering, I guess. I don't know. Yes.

configuration you know No kidding. Than seven territory. When the stakes are this high and the stories are so funny, it's a 10 out of 10 for me. It's a 10 out of 10. And, like, if there's anything

He bangs his head on the table a couple of times. We look around to see if anyone had noticed everyone was partying.

I was working in my code

that it is impossible and you people submit them every year. If if you have not

This one's eight spooky bets for me because it's very spooky, sad or not. Like, sometime That's true. Sometimes, Wes, things that are are are sad are spooky too.

dying in it the whole time. Okay.

Scott to miss anything. Yes. Drop create scripts. The boss ran it on the prod DB, and then he asked me why every table was empty.

I feel like

for in the first place, and you need to store them somewhere safe because

Oh, man. No. We didn't get fired because of that incident. The shame of sitting in that postmortem

Oh, man. I'm gonna give that a a, six out of seven for sure. Six out of seven. I'll give it a Six. I'll give it a five out of seven. If this didn't have a backup, you could go higher on this one. But definitely one of those stomach in your, pity your stomach moments for sure.

CJ says real. It is fake.

IE five was not on the Mac. There was an IE version on the Mac at one point, and this is no. I've never seen this slash thing ever. This is fake, fake, fake all the way down. CJ.

late last night when my eyes beheld

depending not only on the customer country, but also how many purchases the customer had done in the past, whether it was a high ranking customer, whether or not they had submitted documents before, whether or not the customer was considered validated.

late last night when my eyes beheld

Everyone else was also testing stuff in that same staging server, and forced validation was getting in the way of the customer validation

It was a browser hack. You doing the hives?

every other day. Awesome. So I'm there. It's a night. I hate working with this stuff. Like, the people always complain about Stripe and PayPal, and it's it's the reason people hate them is because they grow so large that that gets through.

That I'm gonna say that's a legit one. There was backslash. I don't know if nine was the one. For whatever reason. Riverside is messed up. But can you hear me, Scott? not Yarn you kidding? I didn't even know about this. No chance.

about five months before the pandemic hit. It is a catastrophic production

scrap it and start from scratch unless you have an extremely,

in my nice little little cave here.

And mine is just, like I just grabbed one from the kids' bin, like, ten minutes before this started.

Denied.

Yeah. No kidding. A few guardrails in place.

What's going on here? Let's wait a second.

that's nuts. Like, once Wes I when I was in university,

like a fireworks Oh, man.

I have cobwebs on my mouse pad, and it keeps messing up my scroll. I'm, like, going like this every single time Then about a month ago, the spooky part started.

Alright. Last quest or last story we have for this Node, and then, coming up on Wednesday, we have a full hour of them as well, or all the, I guess, white Vercel, This is real.

Scott

like, marketing campaign.

to get a PR containing all of the back end and front end modifications approved. Another fifteen minutes merge to master, another fifteen minutes to merge to production, and we are done. The release party is about to start. Crack open some brewskies. Right?

for half an hour while you wait for the thing to to deploy and and be pushed through. You know? Because, like, some of these sites are down,

and then I did a second or third take to do some harmonies and backups.

Finance? Wow. That sounds like something that would be be real. And and putting something in line also sounds like the move because probably one of those margins is from it being Bos, and and the extra one is because of it being

anything,

these ones I like the ones where the database goes away, but I really like the ones where real money is involved. And I really, really like the ones where products Next one's called a browser hack. I worked for a small literal mom and pop shop. Wife was the programmer. Husband was the designer and head of company

that sometimes I forget that I was a music major.

So

Wes says real. CJ, what do you say? You're not telling what the answer is.

And I was like, should I back up my config? I was like, that'd be fine. It wasn't fine. It I I had everything go missing. Luckily, I had a backup from, I don't know, a couple months ago, but

What is that? Sign up and get two months for free. You can fix all of your bugs in production, all of your bugs in development, Hey. The site's down. Yeah, I said with a forced smile. Working on it.

now had a discount. Products that had no discount set up, You know that probably about four or five of these spooky stories GitHub our prompting have had this probably wouldn't have been an issue if we had Century enabled.

But when when those pricing errors go out,

We forgot to unhard Node the thing, didn't we? I fill out my soul leaving my body as he says firm calmly, And I decided to refactor that, and that was a nightmare too. And that was just straight up HTML and CSS.

talking about software bugs in, like, sports apps or something, and they're like, ESPN thinks this player plays for this team. So I was like, no. ESPN doesn't think that. It's like some poor intern who pushed a wrong value in the app and all of a sudden you know, it's like, But, folks, before we do that, let's talk about something that doesn't suck. Let's talk about Century, century.io, spooky tales a good seven creepy crawlies because

awful.

Classic. No. Oh, no.

ProGaDx are screwed if you lose those. So with extreme regret, I had to say goodbye to my Npm account and package I built from the ground up. No.

Although the financial loss was very extensive, hopefully, you can cut back.

So I'm a maintainer of a fairly popular npm package. Nothing huge, but it recently crossed the 2,000,000 monthly downloads mark. Nothing huge. 2,000,000 That's pretty big. Monthly. That's huge.

to store those

The incident caused a solid bond between us. He was my favorite colleague until he left.

password hygiene, but it's worth to figure all of this stuff out and keep it all straight as to what's available in which country.

And, see, we all know that a well timed browser hack can really, really save our ass.

used the first available discount in the list,

was probably more traumatizing than being fired.

Woah. No

you you are going to panic mode immediately because you goofed something up. Right?

So I would probably wipe your computer the whole the whole, the whole Internet went down. And the the funniest parts were people tweeting about their, like, Internet connected beds going down. Oh, yeah. Oh, well the the future of

West is mad that I'm telling you what his answer was. I just if I could hear his mic, I would know what he said.

a five minute old backup here.

so that's the end of the first one. Should we just keep rolling? Because I don't wanna end the livestream.

Yeah.

That's the worst.

Or did you try from another phone or computer or something? Because, like, I Node the first bite

of of Node password if you if you get locked out. And if you can't get them all, you're probably a hacker. And, unfortunately, that means some good people get caught in the toying of it because they had bad if the Internet goes down,

But CJ says fake.

shared by every site on

Vercel of this.

CJ, two for two. Wes, o for two. Conditional comments used to deliver HTML or CSS to different versions of IE if l t I e seven.

which collapsing margins Wes you have two margins that butt up against each other. Wes, real or fake? pretty scary stuff here. This will also be five from me.

a by, like like, Sunday morning, they had stopped it. But, like, it was it was running rampant.

real. No way. This is a in all versions of Internet Explorer 5.54.

Wes.

inflicted upon new hires. So this Wes a new hire, been there six months,

and it happened to be conveniently sorted from high to low. This was a cause of an API in our CMS that returned a field such as object dot discount dot value, but my code only checked if object dot discount exists, which always was

Okay.

always back up before you do anything where you say, it'll be fine. Yeah. Always do that. Hey, Wes. This next one is a little bit long.

before 3PM. There was one Wes left to run. The case where the customer is not validated.

Folks, you're getting the live feed here. Yeah. The live

which is is absolutely hilarious.

Maybe they were I imported it back into production like my life depended on it, which pnpm sense it did.

I was working in my code

It was me and Steve figuring out our way through microservices.

Real or fake, Wes?

It was a browser hack.

scared the pooch. I I was wanting to test some stuff yesterday

Oh, CJ. This is a family show.

That check was done in the front end, my domain, while the implementation of the new payment method was done by a colleague in the payments team. I'll call him Steve.

Pnpm LAMP stack. Yeah. Scott that it's a bad programming language, but just, like,

problems on your applications.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Those will probably write themselves, but you wanna grab the first Node? Let's get on into it.

to your account. I would not ever want them to be like, oh, sorry. I forgot it. That's the whole point of of backup codes and and all these awful there's there's many layers

let's get into the next one, ghost password.

I'm happy that Riverside is even up today,

a, like, a test mode where it will tell you how many things it will update. Yeah. What are the dry run or something like that? Yeah.

Wes, I didn't hit you in any spooky voice today.

The, like, the legacy code that have been tweaked year over and over and over to Vercel little edge case possible, it is almost never a good idea to just

you know, 25 files in each directory that was, like, index forward slash hyphen hyphen new 20 you know, whatever. And and you'd update something. You'd be like, why JS this wrong? I was Scott using the right one or whatever.

five

This is a true story, and it happened in 02/2019, CJ, thank you for joining us. You're more than welcome to stick around or go off and do whatever you have to do for the rest of the day. I got

Real.

This targets IE 5.5 and IE six specifically by doing a backslash nine at the end Alright. Number four, the ping fix for IE six. A shim, a PNG alpha in IE six by replacing images using Microsoft's filter Beautiful.

Fascinating.

I had a five year old MySQL dump on my Five minute not yet. Five year old. Yeah. Major difference.

of our clients' websites you know the fix is in or you hope the fix is in, but you gotta sit there

API test. Again, Steve looks at me like he's saying, we are nice to everyone who's going to be nice to us. Again, we go Scott it. We hard Node the customer is validated in the front end.

probably from a beach somewhere. Hey. What the hell is happening? My phone is blowing up. Nothing to worry about. I lied through my teeth.

Bro, if that if that loss is a a milli