Comment by buu700

4 years ago

I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager.

I'd semi-automated the generation of emails to parents about how their kids were doing at summer camp. It was basically just a script that asked various questions and pulled various data about the camper from the database, then used that to generate a letter that could be used as a starting point and edited to be more personal (or, if in a rush, just sent as-is).

Long story short, due to user error, a value of 0 was set for a camper's behavior/politeness/helpfulness rating, which resulted in a joke sentence that I'd written as an Easter egg getting slipped into that particular report. Cue egg on my face when a parent calls in, baffled about the otherwise normal report containing a casual aside about how terrible their nice little girl was.

After that experience, I always assume that every string in the code will inevitably be seen by a real user/customer.

2 comments

buu700

Reply
bostik  4 years ago

> assume that every string in the code will inevitably be seen by a real user/customer.

That's a good rule, and the same principle can be applied to communications in general. In fact, I have the three rules printed on my office door:

    Dance like nobody's watching
    Encrypt like everybody is
    Email as if it were read out loud at a deposition

floatingatoll  4 years ago

The first production outage of my sysadmin career was when I crashed a university email system at a summer camp (I was a kid attending, probably very early 1990s?) by circumventing the block on emailing the entire university, using the Mac keyboard shortcut Cmd-A to select all in the recipient field in the cc:Mail UI. I apologized for childishly causing harm with something I thought would be funny, and so they decided not to kick me out.