I still might sometimes put a funny/lighthearted twist on debugging logs that nobody outside the company would see, but I never put in swear words, condescending things, or anything else I wouldn't be okay with if it was accidentally logged in production.
I fortunately did not have to make that experience myself, but I've seen too many supposedly "internal only" messages turn uninternal.
It was a placeholder until the software dev team responsible for the server could deploy software onto it (they asked it be setup with something in the index.html so they could confirm it was running, they didn't care what)
The networking team in advance of that wired it up to some load balancers.
They took an IP which had formerly been a decommissioned cluster of webservers serving the main website for the entire company (an internet retailer named after a river in some other country, you've probably never heard of them).
The DNS loadbalancers found the old IP (it had never been deleted from their configs which was the root cause) was now live and it was REALLY fast, so they shunted most of the traffic over to it.
Created a sev1 outage for "users reporting 'foo' on the website"
I'm happy I kept it professional that day.
> Let's say 99 of your 100 machines are taking 750 msec to handle a request (and actually do work), but this single "bad boy" [machine] is taking merely 15 msec to grab it and kill it. Is it any surprise that it's going to wind up getting the majority of incoming requests? Every time the load balancers check their list of servers, they'll see this one machine with nothing on the queue and a wonderfully low load value.
> It's like this machine has some future alien technology which lets it run 50 times faster than its buddies... but of course, it doesn't. It's just punting on all of the work.
optimized as shit for that one request...
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.
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 401: I robs drug dealersShow me a GoT scene anywhere this level
Well, "created" may be too big a word here... Transferred it from book to screen, rather.
As evidenced by the fact that when they ran out of stuff to transfer and started actually creating for themselves, quality took a nosedive.
This is a test.
This is only a test.
Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled
and you would not have been informed.A previous company I worked in once managed to send the following in patch notes:
"So sit back, smoke a spliff and stop worrying you nappy wearing fucktards"
... so, yeah, good advice.
Both are, really.
I learned my lesson from him and now I keep these things very clean, just in case.