Before the launch of the XBOX 360, the company I worked for was one of their suppliers, and without going into enough detail to make me identifiable, the management of our two companies had arrived at sort of a stalemate: We didn't want to tell them exactly how our algorithms worked, and they didn't want to tell us exactly what they were doing with them-- think of it like a data compressor where, we don't want them to know the exact compression algo, and they don't want us to have their data.

So, somehow, It is arrived at that a website will be created that encodes MS's proprietary data, but doesn't store it, but also our algorithm is implemented server side, so there's no leakage of proprietary stuff.

A month later, the app is done and tested and I'm decoding data from the website on real hardware. I move on to the next project.

Three years later, the Xbox 360 is out, I decide I'm tired of filling out reimbursement forms for Heroku and its got to be a security risk with no updates in 3 years... so I take a look at the apps stats to see if its feasible to shut it down--exactly zero users. Nobody ever attempted to use it, not even once.

Ironically and unknown to me, the source code had been lost in a freak accident and when I deleted the Heroku account that was the only copy of the source left.

Even worse, a year later someone claimed to have a use for the app and where was it please? And I had to explain we no longer had the source. I remember a very long e-mail about how irresponsible we were.