Code Gone Wrong: The Scariest Developer Tales

It's spooky season! We've collected your stories about the scary situations that made your hair stand on end.

Story 1

It was Friday evening. I just wanted to test a small change, added two lines, and accidentally hit Publish instead of Build.

Production updated instantly. Users, too, instantly started reporting bugs.

I closed my laptop and pretended the internet didn’t exist anymore😅 

Story 2

There was an old project with dozens of global variables. One of them controlled licensing. Nobody knew how. No documentation, just a comment:

// Don’t touch. Ever.

Someone renamed it “for readability.” The server never started again. No one could explain why.

Story 3

The bug only happened on the client side, not ours. I enabled detailed logging to find out what was wrong.

Got 12 gigabytes of logs.

Not a single error message. Only my debug statements.

And after enabling logging, the bug disappeared.

Story 4

The morning after release, the server was on its knees. CPU usage — 100%. Turned out I’d written a recursive call that worked fine in tests with 10 records. Production had 50,000. Since then, I flinch every time I see the word foreach.

Story 5

Every night, exactly at midnight, the app crashed.

Turned out someone used DateTime.Now.DayOfYear as an array index with size 365. 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

No one accounted for leap years. 

Story 6

An intern ran:

DELETE FROM Users WHERE id <> 1;

Only he did it in production. And id = 1 belonged to the sysadmin.  Five minutes later, 300 employees no longer had accounts.

Story 7

After a library update, everything worked flawlessly. No crashes, no errors.

A week later, we found out the app had stopped saving data to the database.

Hidden deep in the code:

except
  // ignore
end;

The developer who wrote it left years ago. But his spirit still haunts the codebase.

Story 8

I commented out an old piece of code so it wouldn’t interfere. Months later, a colleague “cleaned up the project” and accidentally uncommented it. The code compiled. It worked. Except now, every time we print a report, the CD drive opens.