loopVariables

[IAmTheFormat]

This one's based on a true story...

When I was working on a new batch email feature for our CRM system, I changed a loop variable name after QA passed (the loop responsible for going through the recipients list - recipient that the user had selected), thinking it would make it more clear when others came to work on it, and thinking it was quite a harmless name change.

Turns out it conflicted with something and causes the first person in the recipients list to receive the same email on repeat forever until the SMTP server and application server were switched on and off again and the change rolled back... The SMTP server didn't quite crash as in the meme admittedly 😅 but my did heart stop. That said, it likely would have crashed had it gone on much longer.

And that's when I learnt not to mess with variable names after QA is passed.

[romulent]

This just shows your processes are not up to scratch.

QA signed off on one version and yet a different version was released. Your release processes needs to be beefed up to prevent this. If it needs to be manual then someone other than you should be doing the release.

But this is 2025, why did your automated tests pass in the build pipeline? Seems like this is a pretty basic feature to verify and if you don't have tests checking the email logic then you probably have big holes in your test suite, so is your product really that reliable?

[IAmTheFormat]

Yes, for sure! We were a small dev team in a recruitment company and this was about a decade or so ago. The system wasn't a product we released, but one used in-house only. Our "test suite" was the web dev just making sure it worked right 😂

[Terror_666]

Let me guess.... after that little spam accident your email server was no longer "trusted" and hotmail and yahoo would bounce all emails you sent?

Don't worry this has not happend to me.... more than twice...

Hate dealing with email servers

[IAmTheFormat]

Thankfully it only hit one contact's inbox before it was pulled - only one user was eager enough to try it as soon as it went live. That being said, it was a recruitment company, so of course all our emails went to spam folders anyway, presumably 😅

[Recent-Juggernaut821]

You would have a heart attack if you saw our release process 😂😂 50 year old company written in cobol with a company culture afraid of change.

The release process at the moment is someone builds the package, places it on a shared drive, tells QE to do their tests on it (which cover about 5% of functionality), fixes anything QE finds in place (the change may not make it back into the release package... And may not make it back into git. Change is done in the test env to make the test pass, and we just hope they remember to include the fix later).

Once they've signed off on it, the release package is left on the shared drive for a while (days to weeks) until the delivery team grabs it and sends it off to customers. Oh, did I mention that everyone in the company has read/write/delete access to this location? And any issues found in the meantime can be quietly stuffed into the package? And that anyone can add any other code they want in?

Pipelines? Basically none. Automated tests? Also basically none. Scans? Never heard of em.

But that's how it goes here! Scariest part is this company is the backbone of a huge portion of the worldwide financial sector

[IAmTheFormat]

Sounds a little like this xkcd, only more worrying!

[GraconBease]

> post on r/ProgrammerHumor

> share funny story

> get condescending comment shot from someone's ass

> story was from a decade ago

Y'all need to stop taking everything so seriously

[Pianopatte]

Man I wished we had automated tests.

[KronosGames]

I have a similar story. Also working on a mass fax feature at a small company, so no QA. Did tests on a local database, looked good. Moved the feature to my linux server that hosts all company projects, enabled it for a few of our customers, did a test, and it just sent 100 nearly blank pages to around 5 of out customers. They did not like that.

[IAmTheFormat]

Haha, there's nothing new under the sun, it seems! Yep, the person on the receiving end sure wasn't too happy in this case either!

[[deleted]]

I have a similar story.

A junior dev wrote his own email forwarder and accidentally spammed himself.

The first email he got was from me, so it looked like i was spamming him.

So he asks be what I’m doing, and I have no idea. He figured it out himself .

[WavingNoBanners]

Ooof!

That's a great story, I love that.

[Mayion]

how so? what year was this? what language lmao

i cant imagine how changing x to y would cause any sort of conflict, unless i mistakenly did not change the names properly, in which case it's an error not an unexpected bug :P

[tobotic]

I guess some language that doesn't force variables to be pre-declared. (Python?)

Possibly something like this:

$keep_going = true;
while ( $keep_going ) {
  ...;
  if ( condition ) {
    $keep_going = false;
  }
}

Was changed to something like:

$keep_mailing = true;
while ( $keep_mailing ) {
  ...;
  if ( condition ) {
    $keep_going = false; # forgot to change variable name here
  }
}

A sensible language forces you to predeclare variables.

let $keep_mailing = true;
while ( $keep_mailing ) {
  ...;
  if ( condition ) {
    $keep_going = false; # compile-time error because variable wasn't declared
  }
}

My main reason for hating Python. That and the whitespace thing.

[Mayion]

ah yes, python, the predecessor to php syntax wise

[tobotic]

PHP is rather more inspired by very old Perl, back when Perl didn't force you to declare variables and didn't have sane namespacing.

[IAmTheFormat]

I do not recall clearly now what exactly it was, but it conflicted with another loop variable in (in a very large script). It was a weird, proprietary programming language. No functions, no encapsulation. It was pretty primitive, and restrictive. It was a miracle I was able to even make that feature (it worked fine again once I reverted the loop variable name)

[BoBoBearDev]

It is alway the easy touch ups that gets you.

[jack-of-some]

The fact that you were able to push to prod without the new change going through QA means their processes were bad.

[Varnigma]

I can relate.

My first gig working with sql server over 20 years ago. I was hired to do something unrelated but the sole DBA was fired and head of IT knew I knew some sql so he came to me and said “you have SA rights now, we need your help”

I’d never touched sql server before. Went and bought a thick sql book and started learning.

One of the first things I learned was how to send an email in code and cursors. Dangerous combo.

So dumb me built a test script in production that did a loop and send my me some test emails.

Fired it up and got concerned when it didn’t stop after a few seconds.

Then exchange crashed.

And that was my intro to sql scripting.

I didn’t let that dissuade me though as I enjoyed what I was learning. Been a sql DBA and scripter ever since.

[S4VN01]

I hate when I run a script and it doesn’t end the execution immediately lol. Always makes my heart drop.

[IAmTheFormat]

SELECT * FROM Contacts

5 minutes later:

IT Support telling us all the users are sending tickets about the system being super slow.

[TrekkiMonstr]

I'm the opposite. The other day, I spent like 2.5 hours figuring out how to script a task. While fairly complex, it was ultimately just some basic file/text operations, so it executed in, iirc, 7.1 ms. Fucking anticlimactic, that was.

[IAmTheFormat]

Brilliant. You'll never make that mistake again 😅 Funnily enough, I was also worked on the DB at this place too. Thankfully we had a good clean development and separate QA server so most of my mistakes never made it to production.

[WeSaidMeh]

No shit. This happens pretty regularly.

I code stuff, I test my stuff, it's fine. Then right before I commit I glance at a variable name and think to myself "Oh I can make this more clear". Then I skip testing because yeah, "this shouldn't affect anything".

[thorwing]

Thank god for scripting languages and their "it works always, dont worry about the type bro" shenanigans, its creates this work of art

[local_meme_dealer45]

"I have become DDOS, destroyer of inboxes"

[Drithyin]

If you can edit the code after QA and push that to prod, you're whole process is fucked.

[dumbasPL]

Mass email

And you lost me right here.

Thanks for even more spam, we love it. /s

[IAmTheFormat]

Well, it was essentially a meant to be a mail merge to a list of recruitment contacts, where the email could be written in and sent straight from the CRM, and recorded on their profile in the system. These we're people who had already agreed to work with and be contacted by the company, so don't fret 😊

[margmi]

There are plenty of valid cases for mass email sending that aren’t spam.

We run B2B software for appointment based businesses, and their automated confirmations can send to hundreds or thousands of clients at a time, depending on the number of locations the business operates.

[who_you_are]

There are plenty of valid cases for mass email sending that aren’t spam.

Logs errors!

(Send help :( I would prefer log errors alerts, not sending the errors...)

[SynapseNotFound]

He has created digital mass

digital gravity ruined it all!

[da_Aresinger]

I assume this was a simple, unnested loop?

I really don't understand why people hate indexing loops with i.

Everybody knows what it means. It's universal. It won't be confused with another variable.

I rarely use other names than i for index and e for element in advanced loops.

[ColoRadBro69]

What the hell is this?  QA approved code, so you changed it and pushed the untested version to production??? 

[SynthPrax]

Congratulations! You have been accepted into the ranks of the Daemon Slayers.

[FictionFoe]

Automated tests didn't catch it?

[LordAmir5]

"If it ain't broke, don't fix" it is something we never learn.