That one week my Python script broke our entire inventory system

I spent 5 days tracking down a bug in a beginner-level script I wrote to automate stock counts, and it was just a missing colon in an if statement. Has anyone else had a tiny syntax error cause a total disaster like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

wren82618d ago

honestly that sounds more like a process problem than a coding problem. if one missing colon can take out your whole inventory system you probably dont have backups or version control set up right. maybe focus on building better safety nets instead of blaming python for a typo you missed.

baker.ben17d ago

is it bad that i laughed because i was the guy who forgot the colon and brought down production for 20 minutes? lol. yeah, i definitely learned my lesson about version control after that. these days i triple check my yaml files too, but mistakes still happen when you're running on three hours of sleep.

calebw5013d ago

Triple checked my YAML once and still managed to put a tab where a space should go. Production went down, my boss stared at me like I just set the server room on fire, lol. These config files are basically haunted, I swear.