Yeah. This was at least 4 years ago and I had very little knowledge of what else was out there. However, even then, I knew this guy was just being a douche and didn't want to do a little extra work.

I already put out the full disclosure that I knew very little about linux. Since we were recording so much data, I know it would be a bad idea to just let my scrapper script run for a full week writing to the same file. So I would launch my script so that I would run for 24 hours writing to a file. Then the next day I would start up a new instance with a new file (I forgot at least twice, but nobody else noticed that the line seemed to be perfectly level slope for ~24 hours). After we had finished laughing about the memory discovery, someone was asking me how I pieced it all together as they were impressed with my work. When I got to the point about starting the script, they were like "oh, you could have just used cron."

On the bright side...it wasn't the script logging the memory usage that caused all the memory usage (I've seen that happen before as well :P)

I remember having to deal with one guy on a phone who was a sap/bigass mini/mainframe database guy - can't remember the details. But every question you asked him felt like you were in the movie Airplane, he'd answer stuff in the dopiest way possible. The capper was I was trying to get to the point of being able to get some data from him as a feed, and he said we had to send the sql for such a request in a pipe or file or something like that. Now this guy knows I'm a senior developer, so I ask

Me: "Okay, I don't know your database, tell me what this sql I need to use is please?"
Him: "It's the query language used to to extract data from a database..."

One advantage of working in an over administered environment is it is almost impossible to incorrectly update live data. Even simple data changes we (as developers, I guess DBAs can do whatever the f*ck they want but they don't really have an interest in the data, so never want to change it anyway) make have to be scripted and run by a DBA in our pre-production environment. Frustrating at times, but probably a good idea so that you don't forget any 'where userid = 'xxx'' clauses.

Not really programming but it's still wtf.

Our clients have databases of all sorts of financial funds and plan info. One of the things my company helps them do is pull that data into excel where they can make pretty little graphs and charts.

So the end result of one of these excel files is a table with about 20 lines of data. For some reason, whoever designed this file thought it was necessary to pull over 4000 rows of data from the database and fill the excel sheet with formulas that extended out to column IV (the limit for excel 2003). The file was like 15mb large. If I had done it it would have been <1mb.

The bane of my existence are our clients either:

a) Writing massive lol spreadsheets which become so crucial to business function that break and I have to fix

b) Clients writing their own applications which break and I have to fix

c) Clients running their own queries against our databases and either bringing them to their knees or just writing an incorrect query which doesn't give the correct answer and using it anyway for a couple of months until they realise "hurrrp. this query isn't returning all the data I want. fix it!"

d) My personal favourite. Clients writing their own client/database application, but setting up their database in a random schema in one of our development databases. From time to time we stop/start/restart/turn-off/whatever our development databases (or even funnier, when we blow it away entirely and rebuild it) and the phone rings:

Me: "Hello, application support"
Phone: "Hi, this is blah blah from the help desk, we just had blah blah call asking us why their application <name of an application I have never heard of> stopped working"
Me: "oh luuuuuulz have I got some bad news for them"

Excel 2003 hotfix package: February 29, 2004

I accidentally updated ownership records for properties so that each owner looked like they gained ownership on the exact same day (affected about 45-50k records). What happened was I was doing multiple things at once while trying to create a trigger on a table in the development database. Got distracted, forgot to switch from production to development when a set of data was requested and ran an update statement for testing purposes that I forgot to type in part of the where clause.

Fun times that day...

We now keep development and production databases on separate server, hehe.

Forgot a where clause on a trigger? Nope never did that , well recently anyway.
One of the things I do to prevent messes like that is I have the background color on my telnet sessions different colors for test and production. It has saved me a few times.

this should go in the Remember When thread...ie I remember when people still used telnet

Some guy showed up in the Programmers section of Stack Over flow and is refusing to acknowledge that revision control is something his company should use.

Seriously, I thought that was the one thing we agreed on.

I'm having trouble deciding if hes trolling or not.

A: VCS
B: OVERKILL
A: lol