Tech Horror Stories
True stories from the trenches.
I Found a Comment That Said Do Not Touch This and I Touched It
I touched it. The build broke. The senior dev sighed and said yeah that happens. He did not elaborate.
The Database Migration That Never Ended: A 47 Hour Saga
47 hours of database migration. 14 rollbacks. The migration script is now longer than the application itself.
Our Legacy System Runs on a Mainframe That Requires a Blood Sacrifice to Reboot
The mainframe requires a ritual reboot. Only one retiree knows the sequence. He lives in a cabin without phone service.
I Inherited a Codebase Where Every Function Is Called doTheThing
Every function is named doTheThing. There are 47 versions. Nobody knows which one actually does the thing.