(Ovid - funny) Re: What quality is your company's code?

I've seen some nice responses and some supportive /msgs in the chatterbox. Thanks!

Already, I have a couple of interesting leads to follow up on. In the meantime, I thought I would toss out one of the more amusing debacles that occurred here.

The IS director was writing some code and asked me a question about it. It seems that he was writing a routine that recursively searched directories and deleted old files. Can you say "File::Find" boy and girls? I knew you could.

I mentioned that the File::Find module could handle that safely and he replied "this code is so simple that I don't need a module to do this." -- Yeah, you can see this coming a mile away, I know :)

I cracked open the Cookbook and took about two minutes to write AND test the code that he was developing. My boss took about an hour. Once he was satisfied with it, he ran it on our development server. The code went wild and got into an infinite loop and deleted most of our development environment and crashed the server. It took about half a day to restore everything from backups and get to work again.

Cheers,
Ovid

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Comment on (Ovid - funny) Re: What quality is your company's code?

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(jeffa) Re: (Ovid - funny) Re: What quality is your company's code? by jeffa (Bishop) on Dec 06, 2000 at 00:34 UTC
Jeez - and I thought that I had it bad when I worked for the inspiration for this node. All I can say is, look for another job. I am currently on my fifth job since I graduated, two of them were just __NOT__ going to work for me - I made no hesitations to move on. Jeff L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR F--F--F--F--F--F--F--F-- (the triplet paradiddle)	[reply]
Re: (Ovid - funny) File Find by lemming (Priest) on Dec 06, 2000 at 00:13 UTC
LOL! I've written my own versions of File::Find and know it's easy to screw up. I always tested it to death before letting it loose like that. Why did I write my own? It was prior to that module's release and I needed something that would convert filenames and directories to 8.3 Uppercase format (Just 8 for dir) without clobbering exisiting files. (Novell, OS/2, Unix, and Windows files) It worked well and I kept using the sub for my own use. (It's not as flexible as File::Find, I had to tweak things often enough)	[reply]