Development Horror Stories
Speaker: Roberto Cortez & Oleg Selajev

For more blog posts, see The Oracle Code One table of contents

Stories

• Broke filter so showed adult videos
• Deleted inventory and no backups. Had to re-enter all data manually.
• Units of measure
• Emails with invalid address so bounced around for hours
• Deleting a repository instead of a file
• Used a magic number and it lived on forever..
• Underpowered servers ad not enough tuning.
• Off by one error because didn’t account for leap year
• Recursive SQL statement caused issue with a very large bill of materials [and we all learned sql can be recursive]. Lesson: filter at as low a level as possible. Went from 100+ years to 75 milliseconds
• Missig where clause so emailed too many people a scary message
• Running a performance test on wifi is really slow.
• Decompiling a jar making a change and recompiling it.
• Running a performance test on prod. Didn’t tell security. Thought being DDoS’d
• Deleted database. Thought was backed up vs being made permanently unavailable. Only two days of data entry to restore.
• Exposing port publicly lets anyone delete your data
• Ran test against prod. Looked like DOS so autoblocked headquarters. Prevented all reservations. Workaround was to use mobile site since run elsewhere.
• Running CI on a laptop caused it to disappear when person got fired. It reappeared briefly when machine next booted up.
• Project’s CM system is putting ode on CD and putting it in a file cabinet. Have software, but not OS or hardware to run it on
• Added RAM instead of pagination
• Rebooted prod (vs retired prod) by going to wrong building

They said youl could use a fake name or fake company name if you went up. Most everyone used their real name. It was funny because he kept asking if people used their real name. When I went up, I said I worked for an unnamed bank in NYC. The guy after me said he worked for an unnamed trading company in NYC.

I also liked how he “baseined” how many people would raise their hands by asking eveyone n the room t raise their hands hen he commented that 90% was like 100%

My take: I went to this session last year. It’s mostly stories from the audience which is fun and different. Great topic for lunchtime.