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Last year for Halloween, we put the call out for tales from the developer crypts that have kept haunting you, lo these many years.

We had so much fun we decided to do it again, and the timing proved eerie…

LeftPadGif.gif Read on for spine-tingling dev tales that will keep you up at night:

“At my last job, your new password couldn’t contain (as a substring) any of your 5 previous passwords. So they were required to store everything plaintext to enforce that.”

“My company decided to switch from Om to Om Next to React, so now we have THREE FRAMEWORKS in our frontend”

“We need hardware for testing. We can’t afford that. Ship it and see what happens. We may never understand the unhappy customers.”

“Time stamps in local time only. Good luck with daylight savings in general as well as activity scheduled at 2am.”

“…If there was already a column named something, such as ‘BirthDate’ and this individual (who created the database) wanted to use a column with the same name, instead of re-using the column that already exists and populating it with the correct data, he would create a column named ‘BirtthDate.’”

Me: “Hi, just writing to let you know that the new API is returning a 500 error with the message of ‘OK’ when given valid data, and the data is appearing subsequently in the list when requested as though it all worked ok…” Them: “Yeah that is expected, just map the 500 error with the message of ‘OK’ as though it were a 200” Me: “….. dafuq”

“Make a modification in the frontend the card said. Some angular, some bootstrap, some ember, and of course knockout #itsnotclutteritspolyglot”

“Startup: wanted me to be fullstack +dba + project manager+ testing + GUI designer + scrum master.”

“…Having to urlencode my password in my jdbc formatted connection string which then has to be base64 encoded and placed in a yaml file with some substitutions so that it can be compiled to json and not incorrectly escaped due to special characters…”

“Homemade crypto plugin for SQL Server sometimes corrupted client data, which was life & death important. Couldn’t recompile the plugin. Discovered race condition causing use of fallback crypto key. Taught tech support to decrypt with fallback key. Looked through compiled machine code. Discovered race condition triggered by particular two-byte opcode sequence that happened to be readable ASCII and unique. Taught tech support to search and replace that opcode sequence with Notepad++ in the DLL, changing a comma to a tilde, thus solving the problem once and for all.”