I wrote this super complex email scanning, sorting, excel, wang 'em jang 'em, analytic program in python. It would be the first time my bosses had ever seen the total overview of one of our department's in and output (since each response was between dozens of people and the threads never followed up on).
I tried not to hype up the program, it was one of my first after all, but even in its most basic form it was exactly what was needed for this project. People got excited, I got excited. Later that week I had a big meeting with my boss and his boss in one of their offices.
I bring my laptop in and confidently sit down, open it up, and say something grandiose like, "Behold" ...and suddenly the program, the one I meticulously tested on the very inbox I was targeting, suddenly wouldn't work. I started debugging right there, but I couldn't figure out the problem. Him and his boss are just staring at me while I'm leaning over my laptop typing feverishly, my screen looking like the matrix or some shit.
I'm in "programmer time" now, so what felt like 30 awkward seconds was probably closer to a minute or more considering one of them, in the apparent boring silence, clears his throat. Finally I throw in the towel, admit defeat, and try to explain that these sort of bugs happen sometimes. I explained what was supposed to happen; they just nodded their heads solemnly. I was then informed that this project was being closely followed by the company president, but they'd reschedule that meeting for next week.
No pressure...
Later that afternoon I was debugging again. I saw that it was crashing while "reading" emails, but the error code didn't show which one. I had print statements everywhere, but I couldn't see which email was causing the problem or more importantly why. In desperation I started scrolling through the inbox manually... Thousands of emails, but the best I could do is narrow down a date. The poisoned email was somewhere between February 14th and March 22nd - still about a thousand emails.
Finally... I see it.
Re: 请发送 SPCU830928 \ 立即预订！
What... in the living fuck is a Chinese email doing in here? We don't deal with Chinese customers. I look closely, this was one of the kind of erroneous emails my project would try to detect and defeat. It was coming to/from the wrong department! And it turned out to be the Achilles heel.
Suddenly: Ctrl+T's are flying, I've got a dozen stackoverflow tabs open in mere seconds. Uni-fuckin'-code, eh? Chinese character pack, ah? Screw it. It's all going in the program.
import import import
I run the program again. In my bug-hunt I must have inadvertently optimized it. It ran flawlessly. I filled an email with characters from every major language I could find in google translate. The program digested them all.
One final fail safe was needed though. I only needed the program to look like it was working, give me some usable data just for demonstration. Another error in front of the president would be bad - would he even understand? I cracked my knuckles, grimaced, and began to type. try:, except Exception:. I clenched my jaw and continued, pass. It had to be done. I had to be safe.
I glanced at the calendar... Three days. Three days until redemption. I find the meeting invite and click Accept.
We were never given enough time to check our projects and user validation checks was always deprioritized for trivial cosmetic changes on the UI/client-side.
Any time we saw errors in the data - which would usually be far too late into the launch of the project, we'd get anxiety attacks that something worse is about to creep up.
Anticode on July 4th, 2017 at 22:15 UTC »
I wrote this super complex email scanning, sorting, excel, wang 'em jang 'em, analytic program in python. It would be the first time my bosses had ever seen the total overview of one of our department's in and output (since each response was between dozens of people and the threads never followed up on).
I tried not to hype up the program, it was one of my first after all, but even in its most basic form it was exactly what was needed for this project. People got excited, I got excited. Later that week I had a big meeting with my boss and his boss in one of their offices.
I bring my laptop in and confidently sit down, open it up, and say something grandiose like, "Behold" ...and suddenly the program, the one I meticulously tested on the very inbox I was targeting, suddenly wouldn't work. I started debugging right there, but I couldn't figure out the problem. Him and his boss are just staring at me while I'm leaning over my laptop typing feverishly, my screen looking like the matrix or some shit.
I'm in "programmer time" now, so what felt like 30 awkward seconds was probably closer to a minute or more considering one of them, in the apparent boring silence, clears his throat. Finally I throw in the towel, admit defeat, and try to explain that these sort of bugs happen sometimes. I explained what was supposed to happen; they just nodded their heads solemnly. I was then informed that this project was being closely followed by the company president, but they'd reschedule that meeting for next week.
No pressure...
Later that afternoon I was debugging again. I saw that it was crashing while "reading" emails, but the error code didn't show which one. I had print statements everywhere, but I couldn't see which email was causing the problem or more importantly why. In desperation I started scrolling through the inbox manually... Thousands of emails, but the best I could do is narrow down a date. The poisoned email was somewhere between February 14th and March 22nd - still about a thousand emails.
Finally... I see it.
What... in the living fuck is a Chinese email doing in here? We don't deal with Chinese customers. I look closely, this was one of the kind of erroneous emails my project would try to detect and defeat. It was coming to/from the wrong department! And it turned out to be the Achilles heel.
Suddenly: Ctrl+T's are flying, I've got a dozen stackoverflow tabs open in mere seconds. Uni-fuckin'-code, eh? Chinese character pack, ah? Screw it. It's all going in the program.
import import import
I run the program again. In my bug-hunt I must have inadvertently optimized it. It ran flawlessly. I filled an email with characters from every major language I could find in google translate. The program digested them all.
One final fail safe was needed though. I only needed the program to look like it was working, give me some usable data just for demonstration. Another error in front of the president would be bad - would he even understand? I cracked my knuckles, grimaced, and began to type. try:, except Exception:. I clenched my jaw and continued, pass. It had to be done. I had to be safe.
I glanced at the calendar... Three days. Three days until redemption. I find the meeting invite and click Accept.
Stimonk on July 4th, 2017 at 22:22 UTC »
This is diabolical.
We were never given enough time to check our projects and user validation checks was always deprioritized for trivial cosmetic changes on the UI/client-side.
Any time we saw errors in the data - which would usually be far too late into the launch of the project, we'd get anxiety attacks that something worse is about to creep up.
If_You_Only_Knew on July 4th, 2017 at 22:48 UTC »
Sometimes i don't sanitize my inputs just to play along with this guy.