Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats

950: Even SCARIER Web Dev Nightmares (Spooky Stories Pt. 2)

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Oct 29, 2025
Explore chilling web development horror stories that will send shivers down your spine! Hear about unprocessed donation nightmares, accidental database wipes during critical launches, and the financial fallout of whitespace mishaps. Discover how a simple sync catastrophe led to lost e-commerce orders and the panic over developer flags left in production. Unearth bizarre incidents like a developer's mistake resulting in an accidental adult site demo. This spooky journey highlights the importance of careful coding and good practices!
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ANECDOTE

Refunds From Beyond The Grave

  • The developer shipped an authorization-only payment flow and never called the capture endpoint, leaving donations uncharged for months.
  • They wrote a script to capture pending payments and emailed affected donors to resolve the issue.
ANECDOTE

When A SQL Dump Becomes A Guillotine

  • A SQL export from staging included DROP TABLE commands and wiped production content during an NHL site launch.
  • The team had to delay launch and reenter or restore lost content without a prior backup strategy.
ANECDOTE

A Single Indent Cost Hundreds Of Thousands

  • A whitespace/indentation change in Python moved retry logic outside a try/catch, triggering repeated expensive video generation retries.
  • The bug multiplied cloud costs by 5x and cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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