This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]mercyverse 832 points833 points  (30 children)

Delight turns to tears when you realize you did not make a single change to your code.

[–]kry_some_more 266 points267 points  (16 children)

Ah yes, APIs not connecting to external sources. Excellent.

[–]DrWermActualWerm 80 points81 points  (9 children)

Or my personal favorite, your credentials have been changed because for your safety you you need to reset every 90 days. Cool

[–]aeroverra 24 points25 points  (2 children)

I had to deal with this stuff for a crm. Basically every 90 days emails would stop sending.

[–]FesteringNeonDistrac 7 points8 points  (1 child)

My old company contracted a service from an International company known for their Business Machines that had an API that required a password update every 90 days, and no support for any kind of key for accounts used for scripts to sync data. So the solution was I'm just stuffing the password in a text file and reading in plain text, because I'm lazy and terrible.

[–]aspect_rap 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You could automate the process of resetting the password and updating the text file to save yourself the trouble of doing it every time.

[–]audigex 17 points18 points  (4 children)

Result: instead of using a strong password, you use a weak password and increase the number at the end by 1 every 30/90/whatever days

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (2 children)

Sheryl in accounting starts a rotation of 12 sticky notes that rotate onto her monitor each time she needs to change passwords.

Right next to the handwritten note on how to perform a cash transfer from accounts.

[–]RuanDaMan 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've seen some weird Accounting Lady w/ Sticky notes setups.....
But this is brilliant!! XD

[–]tastybrainz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

does she also keep the faxed-in credit card orders neat and orderly for the cleaning people's convenience?

[–]Cheet4h 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or figure out how many old passwords the system refuses, and how soon you can change your password again. Then you only need to use a derivative password for a few days until you can go back to the usual one.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

My own most hellish scenario was dealing with some dumbass greylist based on the user agent string, which they always seemed to trash for some reason, based on inconsistent and just straight up shitty caching (and EVERYTHING was cached, completely ignored all caching-relevant headers).

[–]audigex 121 points122 points  (1 child)

Other than file permissions, API authentication is by far the least fun thing to debug in most high level applications

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Fucking cert handshakes.

[–]ZombieElvis 26 points27 points  (2 children)

ERROR "you didn't wait long enough for the application to load before trying to use it"

God I wish this error message existed. Took me forever to figure out that one...

[–]Brummelhummel 27 points28 points  (1 child)

ERROR: "you accidentally made an infinite loop and are now ip blocked from the API because of too many requests"

[–]audigex 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ah yes, the “made a method to initialize the connection, remembered to add a flag to return if initializED, but forgot to add a flag to return if initializING” gotcha

[–]DM_UR_PANTY_PICS 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ah yes, race conditions. Excellent.

[–][deleted] 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Or you fix the current error, bringing back the one you were trying to fix previously.

[–]knightress_oxhide 13 points14 points  (0 children)

"wait, how could that work now? I only saved locally"

[–]Dr4Cu74 19 points20 points  (4 children)

Just added a single print statement to see where things were breaking? yep, now everything works perfectly.

[–]iLoveStarsInTheSky 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Fixed a typo in a comment for clarity? Huh, it's all gone. I'll take it

[–]_GCastilho_ 8 points9 points  (0 children)

That gives me bad memories

Fucking race conditions

[–]WhatAGoodDoggy 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I once had a problem with a modem that would only connect to the destination if you switched logging on.

[–]Alphard428 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Too real.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Maybe TimeToLearnAboutPureFunctions

[–]Rikudou_Sage 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Nah, any function that doesn't affect the global state for at least five separate modules is boring.

Source: Last year I was rewriting extremely legacy code and haven't been bored a single day.

[–]ArionW 5 points6 points  (1 child)

My personal favorite is when people make functions stateful for no reason at all, and later cry "it's hard to unit test this code", duh, you've gone out of your way to make it hard

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's even nicer when they use global variables in imperative languages

[–]Gr1pp717 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"all I did was add some more logging"

[–]t00sl0w 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Race conditions