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Rookie programmer's code goes up in flames ... kind of

In the immortal words of Shaggy: It wasn't me

Who, Me? This week's instalment of Who, Me takes a slightly different turn, as in the end (spoiler alert) it wasn't their fault. But what a lesson to learn, nonetheless.

Our correspondent, who we'll Regomize as "Bernie", had just landed a job in the IT department of a well-known chain of grocery stores. Each store had its own central computer, and code updates would be deployed from head office to remote stores, tested, then deployed across the chain.

Head office featured a "wall of shame" upon which programming errors were immortalized. Like one programmer whose bad code led to frozen goods being delivered to a warehouse without adequate refrigeration.

Bernie did not want to end up on the wall of shame.

So Bernie was careful. Bernie always tested code before deploying. Bernie took no risks.

Until …

One day, he was entrusted with an update to production code. This had to be deployed live.

Bernie deployed the code to one guinea-pig store, and tested it there. It worked. Sigh of relief. Intending to deploy to the wider network the next day, Bernie went home.

The next day, Bernie found unhappy faces all around. Red flags were popping up all over the system since the prior night's update, and questions were being asked: What did you update? Did you test the code? Was it compiled correctly?

Then, the heart-stopping news: management announced that the guinea-pig store to which Bernie had deployed the code burned to the ground last night. Ashes and rubble.

Oh boy, our hero worried, this is going to make the wall of shame for sure. This is worse than melted ice cream even.

As it turns out, the fire at the store had nothing to do with the computer and computers pretty much never actually explode from bad programming outside of science fiction and bad TV shows anyway. Bernie was off the hook.

Nonetheless, Bernie was very very careful next time they had to update code in production.

What about you? Ever actually destroyed a building (or thought you did) with technology decisions? Tell us all about it with an email to Who, Me?. ®

Editor's note: Mea culpa, you may be suffering deja vu. Due to some small blunder in the way we organize the mailbag, this tale was written up by the previous Who Me team early last year, and ended up surfacing again on our todo list. We hope you enjoyed this latest retelling. The column will be back next week.

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