Dev Horror Stories

Dev horror stories. We all have them. For Halloween, we’ve collected a handful of tales that still haunt our team and others on Twitter. We tried to keep them short, but like Python 3 adoption, they sometimes took longer than originally anticipated. Enjoy.

“None of these tests fail” referring to a 1000-line TCL file where the first five lines were an infinite loop and nothing else ever ran.

“gRPC might change some day, so we wrote our own.”

“We wrote our own SQL dialect”

“It’s just a CSS change. How hard could it be?”

“Multi-hour outage caused by ‘O’ instead of zero in config.”

“There are no bugs, my code is perfect” -> Press cancel on first visible dialog box -> Application crashes

“Several hours of Ruby troubleshooting caused by removing localhost from /etc/hosts”

“Development halted after someone mapped Slackbot deploy train queuing functions to party parrot emoji”

There’s still time to tweet your #DevHorror story to us, too — happy haunting!

Originally published at circleci.com on October 31, 2016.