Fallthrough War Stories
Jan 6, 2025
Dive into the wild world of tech war stories as the hosts share hilarious tales of coworker annoyances and absurd software bugs. From time zone debacles to deciphering API authentication woes, their experiences are both relatable and eye-opening. Discover how symbolic links can turn into security headaches and why different command implementations can lead to chaos. They wrap things up with some eye-catching unpopular opinions that spark lively debate. Prepare for some laughs and insightful reflections on the tech journey!
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The Date-Time Silverlight Bug
- Kris Brandow shared a long struggle with date and time bugs caused by Silverlight converting date-only values to different time zones.
- They spent six to seven months updating a large .NET codebase and database to handle date-only versus date-time-offset fields properly.
Token Refresh Requires New Connections
- Ian Wester-Lopshire described a bizarre API auth issue where refreshing a token required reopening all HTTP connections.
- After weeks, they worked around a server bug by disabling HTTP keep-alive to avoid stale token usage.
Zombie TCP Connections Crash Servers
- Ian shared a story about a load balancer causing TCP connection zombies that crashed a messaging server cluster.
- Junior engineers quickly identified the problem causing months of downtime and implemented a fix despite senior resistance.