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Comment by defenestration | Hacker News Reader

An icon of a skull with bones was used for the debugger. That, in combination with the 'Spy' components, is giving users an eerie feeling. Note to myself: don't be funny in debugmode

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A friend of mine works at an insurance company and used Testicle as a test name. It wasn't that funny when a customer called his workplace asking why he got a letter that starts with "Hello Mr Testicle".

Déjà vu : https://github.com/karma-runner/karma/issues/376

I used to work at a place where a guy used, "Hello Fuckers" as test data. Our manager got a very angry call from a customer who printed out a 300 page report with, "Hello Fuckers" at the end of every line.

I know I am not supposed to, but I laughed at this one :p

One of my former colleagues used to put weird error messages (made up words mostly, but really funny to pronounce). One of these messages escaped QA and went to a customer - but this was a nice guy, and he called up and asked what that word means (it was a while ago, can't remember the word now).

We didn't have anything to do one afternoon, so we searched google maps for names of funny places - there is a town called Hell. Imagine going there and reading the sign "Welcome to Hell". Good times were had at that job :p

10 years ago I built an internal system for tickets (really old school VB and internal access db) for helpdesk & ISM the internal error code for closed tickets due to user error was id10t it was an internal joke until they decided to pull data from it into the new CA unicenter system which then lead to a bunch of quite important people's names appear with the column next to it saying id10t on the big 50" plasma screens in the new NOC/IT operations center.

I had idea to use something like this in our test data, but then decided to use "John Malkovich" instead. Indeed, it worked really good when test system accidentally sent data to prod system: everyone was immediately alerted, but nobody were offended.

I had a Brazilian group in my previous job, and one of the teams ran global SQA. You could not imagine the frequency with which we talked about testes (= tests in PT).

I always tell my team: never do dirty or offensive jokes in code or test data or filenames. It will be seen by someone important. This has happened many times.

Halo 2 was delayed because a picture of someone's butt was used in error pop-ups and was included on disc.

"Mooning Steve Ballmer: How a Bungie dev's butt may have cost Microsoft $500K" http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8382089/bungie-butt-microso...

A colleague from 15+ years ago had an unfortunate habit of using filenames like "poo" or "shit" for writing debug output.

One morning, the inevitable happened: a very angry client phoned up complaining that his site was swearing at him.

It turned out that the debug log had filled up, causing the site to crash on load, displaying only a single line:

CANNOT OPEN SHIT

The lessons you learn early on in your career.

In a moment of pure debugging hell and hate, I put an alert with the text "WTF!" for a condition that should never occur. I could never get it to reproduce and, due to some distraction, I checked in the code with the alert still there.

I probably don't have to mention who got that alert while working one day. The president of the company, of course! Luckily for me it was not a customer-facing function & they found it funny.

I have a habit of doing print("fuck")/raise Exception("fuck") ... Will not stop until I get caught - so far, so good.

I used to do the same thing. Then, the error that spelled "This should never happen!" started to pop up. A couple of years after the original code was written.

Now, older and wiser, I include full stack trace and my explicit assumptions on all errors - orders of magnitude easier to debug than cryptic error messages. Treat your future self kindly !

I put asserts in code for things that shouldn't happen. Sometimes I put them in debug mode only for friendlier behaviour.

I usually have error logging/reporting with full stack trace. This was a quick one-off that I definitely didn't mean to commit! One web app that I worked on years ago would save the entire session state of the user on error. We had a dev tool that would allow us to jump in with all of our session state all set exactly as this user on the exact spot where they had the error. It was pretty great for reproducing most errors except one pesky one that would show up in the logs randomly.

Finally, one day I accidentally triggered that annoying error by doing a specific sequence of things and then clicking the browser back button a few times, then doing another specific sequence. That was a day of celebration!

Yeah being cute in error or debug messages doesn't work as intended sometimes. I've seen uncomfortable moments when customers called after experiencing downtime / data loss and were reading back logs that contained cute and snarky terminology.

> Remember: your "funny" documentation is going to seem a hell of a lot less funny when the functionality it's joking about isn't working.

https://twitter.com/stuartpb/status/508235714287259648

Eh, you're talking about a company that once named its ad serving system SmartASS.

You can be professional and have fun at the same time. (Or at least most Google engineers believe so.)

At least they didnt call "customer experience" service SpyNet

Some genius at one place I worked decided to call our new SIEM offering 'INASS'. They were completely serious. Company head didn't see anything wrong with it, so for a few months we were offering INASS as a service. Can't remember what it stood for now, but luckily one of my higher-ups got them to change it to something more reasonable.

it gets even funnier when you put the two together!, (SIEM(IN))ASS

Yeah, I had to leave a few meetings to 'get a drink of water' when we were discussing this. I wasn't the only person in the room who did. We got a lot of odd looks from seniors in that meeting. Perhaps it's only a millennial thing to find SIEM INASS funny?

I once headed up the As-Supported Structure team, and a friend of mine got to choose his own team name so he called it the Technical Information Team.

This whilst we were working on a product called the A????????? [0] Information Delivery System. We actually laughed on the conference call when they told us but they weren't joking so someone had to use that super-polite voice you use when telling your boss he's been an obvious moron and explain.

[0] Name of company ommitted :)

Yes. You should always assume that your test and debug strings will leak some day, because they probably will. As boring as it gets, they should at least be professional.

If you are building debug interfaces in the app instance, makes sense to design the wording as the end customer would see it.

We'll make mistakes, its better to be proactive. (another eg: vine shipping iOS apps with debug enabled)

You can be funny without being eerie. Reddit has a bit of always-on debug text hidden under a π as an homage to The Net, and I don't think anyone gets creeped out by that.

Probably wasn't an attempt at being funny, but more just named after desktop debugging tools for inspecting threads and such that have "spy" as part of the name.

The skull, perhaps was just having some fun, though!

For one of my company's web apps (that customers use), for internal development, if too many errors occur within 1 second, it shows a "You're in deep shit :O!" dialog and starts pulsing the page background red. It brings some humor to an absolutely terrible situation.

But the build strips it for production during minification along with a bunch of other development-only code that will never make it in.

Just be careful, and have fun. It's what hacking's all about. :)

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