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Comment by Joyfield | Hacker News Reader

I learned LONG time ago to never write profanities in any part of my work. My boss told me a story where some "strong" language showed up on a projected demo of one of his projects and i stuck to me.

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I coded in an alert with "WTF?!" as the text in an unlikely logic path once. I like having something unique so I know where it came from. Came up in a demo in front of the (govt) client. Luckily they had a chuckle at my expense, but it could have been so much worse. I've got back to either contextual errors or just "foo" for the lazy ones.

I built out some webservers with apache on it for a dev team once. I just set it up with an index.html that had "FOO" in it just to prove that you could point a browser at it and you got "FOO" back. Well a week later they configured them behind a load balancer VIP so they wound up on a public IP address. That was fine, but now you could them from the real world. The mistake happened because that IP address had been used as part of a pool for the public website and it was still configured on the networking gear doing dynamic dns for the front end website. As soon as the IP came back up again the DNS appliance decided that cluster was 'back in service' and started handing out its IP address in response to www.<a large internet retailer>.com. This resulted in a sev1 ticket coming back titled "customers reporting 'foo' on the website". Imagine how much worse it could have been if I hadn't kept it professional and used some more controversial text there...

I have the same policy. Also test data should always be professional.

You don't want this happening to you: http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp

http://blog.fetchnotes.com/post/17155558880/what-happens-whe...

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