“Development Horror Stories”

Speaker: Roberto Cortez & Oleg Shelajev

For more blog posts from JavaOne, see the table of contents

My favorite stories

• Missing a space caused deleting way too much
• Construction workers unplugged
• Email look of invalid emails – crashed server a 5-6 million emails
• Not blaming vs not holding accountable vs not improving
• Backup not following sym links
• QA and Prod on same box means…
• Routed all transactions to one place – “Don’t let developers touch production”
• Loading a table delete all other rows
• Delete IE 8 and 7 to use IE 6. Can’t debug because too much JavaScript for dev console and GWT can’t handle IE 6. Problem was JavaScript closing the right click option on resize
• Dev machine was the only place the code was stored. Decompiling is not the same
• == vs .equals() caused error under one db but not another
• Backup in different file system format and all the files were gone
• Website turned into Chinese because Tomcat using default password

“We are all laughing here, but every story has a teaching moment”

My take: They said this was meant to be a BOF. And they ran it as one wich was good. It was a nice final session of the day. It read like “confessions of developers”