[Question] Dumbest thing/mistake you've done whilst coding

Markshall

Русский Стандарт
Contributor
Dec 18, 2010
2,637
2,389
Let's face it, no one's perfect at anything so we've all made mistakes when coding, so what's your biggest mistake?

Personally, my dumbest mistake was about about 5 years ago when I was developing a publicly released user system in PHP, basically what I did was set up my users table in phpMyAdmin and I had these 2 columns, one was 'password' and the other was 'password_un'. 'un' standing for 'unprotected' (lol.)

Looking back, it's one of the stupidest things I've done. Why have a column for a hashed password, and a column for the un-hashed password. Reason being was that I wanted to be able to email users with the content of 'password_un' in their user record in the event of them forgetting their password.

TL;DR: "stored hashed and un-hashed passwords in database to be able to email users their un-hashed password when they forget it"

So what's yours?
 
Last edited:

Berk

berkibap#4233
Developer
Oct 17, 2015
863
190
I am a php coder and when I need have to use sessions + echo, I didnt set
$name = "Berkay" and didnt add the ; end.
 

Ecko

23:37 [autobots] -!- eckostylez [[email protected]]
Nov 25, 2012
1,396
960
Not so much coding error as just complete oversight.

Used to develop for a private RSC bot over a decade ago and in the client we implemented an IRC class that connected to our network, joined a specific channel and allowed myself and the other users to perform quite a things (take a snapshot of the game client, send text, move their character, etc). The point of the bot was to be able to macro for long periods of time without getting caught. The IRC portion of the bot allowed us to control each other's characters in case a moderator was nearby so as to not get caught. Basically we were able to bot 24/7 thanks to so many people from around the world who were part of that bot community.

Well as the bot was private (needing an auth code for it to successfully start up), someone eventually deob'd it and found the IRC information (network, channel). They joined and of course naturally the channel was not registered since it was our network and most of us had ircop status. They registered the channel which gave them operator privs. They kicked everyone that wasn't a bot, set the channel to passworded and proceeded to get every account banned by running a script that made each bot say "I am botting" over and over.

Most who used are bot didn't even know why they got banned since they didn't know about the IRC feature, but there was a handful who did and they were super pissed.

PS - the 3 posts after Markshall's are stupid as fuck. First one after his is not dumb, it's just inefficiency. The next two are syntax errors which every person makes at some point in time and, unless you're a fuckwit who doesn't know how to read logs, are easily fixable.
 

BIOS

ಠ‿ಠ
Apr 25, 2012
906
247
Probably recoding a lot of stuff in an app before realizing the real reason why half of the SQL data was missing was because of the field length, not the actual application.
 

BIOS

ಠ‿ಠ
Apr 25, 2012
906
247
Why are most of these replies unrelated to OP question?

Dumbest thing/mistake you've done "whilst coding"
 

griimnak

You're a slave to the money then you die
Jul 20, 2013
956
797
i coded a skype bot but for others to use it they have to install a bunch of bullshit ass modules cuz i know fuckall about python
You can compile your python application with py2exe or exefreeze, it includes all your modules in a zip. I did this with NeptuneX.

Dumbest thing I've done while coding is storing user sessions in cookies. (they could easily change the cookie data with inspect element and fuck up shit)
 

brsy

nah mang
May 12, 2011
1,530
272
There have been times where I tried an approach to code something, and it worked partially, but not 100% to how I wanted it. I would then try a different approach IN THE SAME FILE, and I'd most likely fail. I'd try to CTRL + Z to get the original, and I'd run out of undos :(
 

griimnak

You're a slave to the money then you die
Jul 20, 2013
956
797
There have been times where I tried an approach to code something, and it worked partially, but not 100% to how I wanted it. I would then try a different approach IN THE SAME FILE, and I'd most likely fail. I'd try to CTRL + Z to get the original, and I'd run out of undos :(
Backups are essential
 

Adil

DevBest CEO
May 28, 2011
1,276
714
I was writing a testing application for a company a couple of years ago and I had to install it on their 'main' server (an in office box that contained application code, version control systems etc). After trying to install node and needing a newer version of Python, we somehow managed to break the server completely. We did fix it, though!
 

LeChris

github.com/habbo-hotel
Sep 30, 2013
2,744
1,326
Probably recoding a lot of stuff in an app before realizing the real reason why half of the SQL data was missing was because of the field length, not the actual application.
I did that just yesterday, spent an hour trying to figure out while my authentication wouldn't work. Password hash size was 60 characters, field size was only 50..
 

M8than

yes
Mar 16, 2012
463
102
I did that just yesterday, spent an hour trying to figure out while my authentication wouldn't work. Password hash size was 60 characters, field size was only 50..
Exactly the kinda thing I did the other day. We're all scrubs here
 

MayoMayn

BestDev
Oct 18, 2016
1,423
683
There have been times where I tried an approach to code something, and it worked partially, but not 100% to how I wanted it. I would then try a different approach IN THE SAME FILE, and I'd most likely fail. I'd try to CTRL + Z to get the original, and I'd run out of undos :(
Use Sublime Text Editor man, fastest and most stable editor of all. Even if you forget to save your work, it auto saves it inside the application itself, so if your computer shuts down, nothings gone
 

JynX

Posting Freak
Feb 6, 2016
710
438
Use Sublime Text Editor man, fastest and most stable editor of all. Even if you forget to save your work, it auto saves it inside the application itself, so if your computer shuts down, nothings gone
*cough* Old thread *cough* Gravedigging *cough*
Sorry, I've got a bit of a cold going on.

ONT: Not true at all, Notepad++ has a plugin that does that and backs it up so that's not anything better, and could you prove that it is the fastest and most stable editor? I'd like to see some stats on that. :)
Proof:
 

MayoMayn

BestDev
Oct 18, 2016
1,423
683
*cough* Old thread *cough* Gravedigging *cough*
Sorry, I've got a bit of a cold going on.

ONT: Not true at all, Notepad++ has a plugin that does that and backs it up so that's not anything better, and could you prove that it is the fastest and most stable editor? I'd like to see some stats on that. :)
Proof:
A bit of Googling will give you the answers. I have tried most of editors available like Atom, Brackets, etc, and for me Sublime Text is the fastest and most stable. All the others is buggy and crashy, and the thing I like most about Sublime, is that you can choose between different designs and addons.

Sent from my SM-G928F using Tapatalk
 

JynX

Posting Freak
Feb 6, 2016
710
438
A bit of Googling will give you the answers. I have tried most of editors available like Atom, Brackets, etc, and for me Sublime Text is the fastest and most stable. All the others is buggy and crashy, and the thing I like most about Sublime, is that you can choose between different designs and addons.

Sent from my SM-G928F using Tapatalk
You can also use addons in notepad++ see .
You can use different designs in notepad++ see .

Never once has my Notepad++ crashed, never once has it been "buggy"..
 

Weasel

👄 I'd intercept me
Nov 25, 2011
4,132
2,456
Had to say this over here. Few days ago I had to run a query to update a certain set of rows for a specific item, however I forgot to add "and thing_id = idhere", almost updating all rows instead on the production database. I was saved by MySQL Workbench safe queries.
 

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