I Pushed a Hotfix Using My Phone While at a Wedding and Now the Bride Is Not Speaking to Me
Hotfix deployed from a wedding. Typed with one hand holding champagne. The bride is still furious. The hotfix worked.
The Firewall Rule Was Just an HTML Comment That Says Please Do Not Hack Us
The firewall config was just HTML comments saying please do not. Our security audit found this in 47 milliseconds.
I Accidentally DoSed Our Own API with an Infinite Retry Loop and Called It Resilience Engineering
Retry loop spawned new retries. 14,000 requests per second from our own API. But auto-scaling passed the stress test.
Our Production Database Runs on a Raspberry Pi in a Bathroom and Nobody Knows
Raspberry Pi runs 47,000 queries per day from the bathroom. Boss thinks it is a Postgres cluster. For 2 years.
I Replaced Our Entire Test Suite with console assert and Nobody Noticed for 6 Months
Deleted the test framework. Replaced with console.assert in production. QA team laid off. Quality is unchanged.
The CDN Cached a 500 Error Page for 24 Hours and Our Site Was Just Broken for Everyone
CDN cached a 500 error for 24 hours. Users thought we went out of business. We were just deploying on a Friday.
Our Monorepo Has 47 package json Files and Not a Single One Is Up to Date
47 package.json files. 14 versions of React. One package depends on left-pad. In the year 2026.
The Production Bug Only Happens When the CEO Is Looking at the Dashboard
The bug only manifests when the CEO opens the dashboard. We think it is his browser extensions. Too afraid to ask.
Our Redis Instance Ran Out of Memory and Started Evicting Auth Tokens of Logged In Users
Redis OOM killed auth tokens. Every logged-in user was suddenly logged out. Support got 14,000 tickets in 10 minutes.
I Disabled CORS for Debugging and Forgot to Re enable It for 8 Months
CORS was disabled for a quick local test. The commit message said TEMPORARY. That was 8 months ago.