3 ms·

Near fifteen years ago I worked for a web agency with basically no code review and very limited QA. Fast and cheap. Insanely fast paced looking back. I had a h

by donatj 3y ago

Near fifteen years ago I worked for a web agency with basically no code review and very limited QA. Fast and cheap. Insanely fast paced looking back. I had a habit of hiding my face in little hard to spot places of sites I worked on in very low contrast. Over my five years there I worked on probably hundreds of sites. A couple weeks after I'd left for my new gig, I get a message from a coworker that a different coworker had pushed up an untested change that broke the navigation on one of their biggest clients. The HTML had become malformed in such a way as to make the entire page a repeating pattern of my very low contrast face, which had been hiding under the navigation. The client thought it was some sort of hack. My friend and coworker knew what I'd been up to and explained to the team. I have no idea what was said to the client. A couple weeks later it happened again with a different site. Same developer pushed bad code and my face hidden under the contents of the page were revealed. They ended up going on an Easter Egg hunt and removed most of my hidden faces. It's not something I would do these days as it's very unprofessional but I still get a little smile thinking about it.

joshstrange 3y ago
I look back on my early web dev career where source control was something unheard of as were dev environments. In fact we regularly edited code live on prod server to debug/develop. Looking back I just shudder thinking about it.
- donatj 3y ago
  Yup. We worked on a shared SMB server that had nightly backups. If we borked something bad enough to need to pull one of the backups it was an ordeal that involved calling (on the telephone) and potentially waking our IT guy who lived in Juneau Alaska Putting a site live just involved FTP-ing the files up to one our shared webservers.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Numbered folders for version control sftp up to the live server.
  - uxamanda 3y ago
    "/site-final2" "/site-final-final-4"
    - IggleSniggle 3y ago
      "/site-final-final-4.bak--prod3-rc0-23.live (1)"
- lelandfe 3y ago
  Worked for an agency that edited sites cowboy style over FTP, and whose “backup plan” for all agency data was a 500gb NAS. I found out that the designer just edited files directly on the NAS, so there was no backup. Classic.
- Foobar8568 3y ago
  Say hi to most DWH, DB developments...
- toast0 3y ago
  Everybody has a dev environment and a staging/qa environment. Places with better processes just have them so they're separate from production. :p IMHO, it's better to be a cowboy and reluctantly follow 'best practices' for the most part, than to be a 'best practices' person and be unprepared to be a cowboy when it's needed. Sometimes, the best way forward is to force an update on production, even if the only method you have is modifying the executable on disk, while it's running. It's mmaped, so you can do this. But you wouldn't know this if you hadn't broken production by using cp instead of install to update a binary you wanted to modify for the next load.
euparkeria 3y ago
I laughed hard reading this.
datavirtue 3y ago
I belly laugh every time I see that scene in Jurassic Park where the admin's animated face was playing on repeat with taunting audio, and Samuel L. Jackson snaps when he sees it and realizes what has transpired. Classic solid gold.
syx 3y ago
As someone who loves Easter eggs this is the best story I’ve read so far. Thanks for sharing it! I hid one in an internal “time sheet” tool we had at work that would be triggered after typing 666
shrubble 3y ago
You should have sold it as a feature, saying that it is a guard image that shows up when something isn't right :)
whartung 3y ago
A nice note to not put anything you don't want other folks to see in software, even in testing. We wrote a system for a client once. And there was a particular functionality that I had to iterate over quite a bit, trying to nail down evasive, frustrating bugs. Needless to say, later, when the client was printing out some invoices and discovered one with several notes reading "F** F** F**!!!!", we got a phone call. We, clearly, didn't managed to scrub the DB properly when we installed it. We were graced by the fact the clients children were in during the weekend, and they felt maybe one of them had managed to add commentary to the data. "Yea! That's what it was allright! It's all fixed now!" Anyway, software never forgets. Version control is forever. Be gentle when adding commentary to code.
anon115 3y ago
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
hnbear 3y ago
Similar fun story - I was working out how to embed jQuery into a Twiki site and how to do mouse-overs on content for some reason, no idea what any more. I needed some tests with different content. Our boss had just got a bulldog puppy that he was enamored with, so I found a gif of a bulldog puppy licking the camera, so it looked like it was licking the screen from inside it and used it as my test image. I ended up making the front page panel of the new team twiki page where we had the team structure laid out a small random chance of showing the bulldog licking the screen in a full screen mouse-over, then I completely forgot I'd done it and went on vacation. The boss was demoing the new site to the global team, with our MD there, and moused over it, triggering the screen licking gif, then moused off it and came back and it wouldn't retrigger and couldn't work out what had happened. It caused bit of a stir, but I was allowed to leave it in place with a very low chance of appearing.
rograndom 3y ago
Back before flexible web layouts or modals were a thing, we went through a phase of opening a new browser window for some content, and locking the size. Sometimes we'd want to open multiple windows and reference them later on, so we had a naming convention like "_popup_a" and "_popup_b". We had an intern one summer who coded all of his new window calls as "_poopup_X". I have no idea how the client actually found it, but boy did we hear about it.

by donatj 3y ago

joshstrange 3y ago

I look back on my early web dev career where source control was something unheard of as were dev environments. In fact we regularly edited code live on prod server to debug/develop. Looking back I just shudder thinking about it.

donatj 3y ago
Yup. We worked on a shared SMB server that had nightly backups. If we borked something bad enough to need to pull one of the backups it was an ordeal that involved calling (on the telephone) and potentially waking our IT guy who lived in Juneau Alaska Putting a site live just involved FTP-ing the files up to one our shared webservers.
stuaxo 3y ago
Numbered folders for version control sftp up to the live server.
- uxamanda 3y ago
  "/site-final2" "/site-final-final-4"
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    "/site-final-final-4.bak--prod3-rc0-23.live (1)"
lelandfe 3y ago
Worked for an agency that edited sites cowboy style over FTP, and whose “backup plan” for all agency data was a 500gb NAS. I found out that the designer just edited files directly on the NAS, so there was no backup. Classic.
Foobar8568 3y ago
Say hi to most DWH, DB developments...
toast0 3y ago
Everybody has a dev environment and a staging/qa environment. Places with better processes just have them so they're separate from production. :p IMHO, it's better to be a cowboy and reluctantly follow 'best practices' for the most part, than to be a 'best practices' person and be unprepared to be a cowboy when it's needed. Sometimes, the best way forward is to force an update on production, even if the only method you have is modifying the executable on disk, while it's running. It's mmaped, so you can do this. But you wouldn't know this if you hadn't broken production by using cp instead of install to update a binary you wanted to modify for the next load.

euparkeria 3y ago

I laughed hard reading this.

datavirtue 3y ago

I belly laugh every time I see that scene in Jurassic Park where the admin's animated face was playing on repeat with taunting audio, and Samuel L. Jackson snaps when he sees it and realizes what has transpired. Classic solid gold.

syx 3y ago

As someone who loves Easter eggs this is the best story I’ve read so far. Thanks for sharing it! I hid one in an internal “time sheet” tool we had at work that would be triggered after typing 666

shrubble 3y ago

You should have sold it as a feature, saying that it is a guard image that shows up when something isn't right :)

whartung 3y ago

A nice note to not put anything you don't want other folks to see in software, even in testing. We wrote a system for a client once. And there was a particular functionality that I had to iterate over quite a bit, trying to nail down evasive, frustrating bugs. Needless to say, later, when the client was printing out some invoices and discovered one with several notes reading "F** F** F**!!!!", we got a phone call. We, clearly, didn't managed to scrub the DB properly when we installed it. We were graced by the fact the clients children were in during the weekend, and they felt maybe one of them had managed to add commentary to the data. "Yea! That's what it was allright! It's all fixed now!" Anyway, software never forgets. Version control is forever. Be gentle when adding commentary to code.

anon115 3y ago

LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

hnbear 3y ago

Similar fun story - I was working out how to embed jQuery into a Twiki site and how to do mouse-overs on content for some reason, no idea what any more. I needed some tests with different content. Our boss had just got a bulldog puppy that he was enamored with, so I found a gif of a bulldog puppy licking the camera, so it looked like it was licking the screen from inside it and used it as my test image. I ended up making the front page panel of the new team twiki page where we had the team structure laid out a small random chance of showing the bulldog licking the screen in a full screen mouse-over, then I completely forgot I'd done it and went on vacation. The boss was demoing the new site to the global team, with our MD there, and moused over it, triggering the screen licking gif, then moused off it and came back and it wouldn't retrigger and couldn't work out what had happened. It caused bit of a stir, but I was allowed to leave it in place with a very low chance of appearing.

rograndom 3y ago

Back before flexible web layouts or modals were a thing, we went through a phase of opening a new browser window for some content, and locking the size. Sometimes we'd want to open multiple windows and reference them later on, so we had a naming convention like "_popup_a" and "_popup_b". We had an intern one summer who coded all of his new window calls as "_poopup_X". I have no idea how the client actually found it, but boy did we hear about it.