Share your software development horror stories!

[Shana]

Hey Community! I work on the Bitbucket product marketing team.

With Halloween approaching, we wanted to discuss a topic tailor-made for October: development horror stories.

Whether it was a lurking semi-colon that snuck in right before a code freeze or an issue that kept rising from the dead, let's talk scary moments that you've faced in software development.

Tell us your spookiest bug hunts, your deployment frights...or a zombie issue in your codebase that took an exorcism to get out! Let us know how you solved it and what you ultimately learned from the experience too.

And if you’re interested in sharing a longer version of your story for the Bitbucket blog, leave your email so we can reach out.

Thanks!

[Jimmy Seddon]

Hey @Shana,

I love this idea!  If you want the long version you can reach me at jseddon@igloosoftware.com

When we first started using git and BitBucket Server (which was Stash at the time).  I accidentally reverted a merge commit in our master branch the day before we were suppose to deploy to production.  In my inexperience at the time, my first plan to fix this was to reset the head commit to an earlier point in the history and I ended up wiping out about two months of development changes.

Thankfully, we were able to reconstruct the history from another developers version of the master branch who had not fetched my changes, but it was a very long and stressful night as we tried to recover in time for our production deployment.

Hope you enjoyed it!

-Jimmy

[rodrigo acuña]

Por favor, solo quiero saber si hay alguna opcion en trello que me permita eliminar una cuenta que esta vinculada a mi correo.

[vorapoap]

I am haunting by a scary fact that by June 2020, all my Mercurial repo will be wiped out. I can do nothing to prevent this - holy water, pumpkin, crosses. I have tried them all

Please help. Do I need a professional exorcist?

[sirgazil]

Oh, yeah, The Slaughter of the Mercurials, euphemistically called The Sunset of Mercurial support in Bitbucket.

[Michal Kreslik]

The absence of an automated conversion tool confirms the fact that Atlassian does not care about its customers. And not even about its paying customers.

Not caring about customers and, more importantly, not caring about paying customers, generally only has one possible outcome in the long run: the end of Bitbucket. I'm not sure if that's scary - to paraphrase Atlassian's statement about the "sunset", I'd say that the end of Bitbucket will enable developers to focus on getting the best possible experience - outside of Bitbucket.

[tobiasvl]

Love the idea, Shana! One horror story I was told once is how Atlassian is turning all Mercurial repos into zombies. They're now basically walking dead! There's no provided solution to this either, so it's pretty frightening. The really scary part of the story is that the zombie repositories will all be deleted FOREVER in June! 😱 Over a decade of technological history will be irredeemably lost next summer. If that isn't a software development horror story then what is?? 👻 I personally solved it by migrating to GitHub with a one-click button. What did I learn? Hmm. Perhaps that Atlassian can't be trusted with my code, I don't know. Going to have to chew on that one! Have a nice October!

[Amphyby]

https://www.codebasehq.com/blog/looking-for-new-mercurial-hosting
in love with codebase now :) said cya to bitbucket too

[NateRiver_1]

I've spend the last week trying to figure out how to push to bitbucket !! i can't figure it out never takes my SSH keys, where is help for this kind of stuff?  I'd pay like so much money right now to have someone help me be able to push to bitbucket! i just want to get on with my life.  If you are one of the lucky few who has managed to get ssh to work with bitbucket don't take it for granted !!

[Muhammad Siddique Sulaiman]

Nate, what exactly is the issue? I could help you get setup if you need it.

[dan.weaver]

My horror story is the hours I waste trying to use bitbucket.  The key issue is that seldom do the online help postings or tutorials help because the screens presented seldom match the one I see on my desktop.  Key example is the chain on how to delete a pull request.  Lots of entries saying it can be done but most don't say how.  The one that does say how shows a screen with a delete icon, but mine has none and it does not have 3 dots to get to one.  All it shows is Merge, Edit, Decline, Approve and icon with 0 in it.  Another example is looking for what version of bitbucket I am using.  No where can I find an About menu to look at version as specified in the online help response.  I clicked on every icon available on the screen to no avail.  It should not be this difficult or obtuse to do basic things.

[Kevin Golding]

My horror story is how I entrusted all my code to the 'cloud', then discovered that the cloud hates me.

It started with an old legacy application with lots of code with commented out bits every time they made a change. I got management to agree to buy a Jira and BitBucket subscription, checked all the code in and thought that everything would be alright.

And it was, at least for a while.

Now, every time I log in to Jira or Bitbucket there is some ridiculous change to the user interface that hinders navigation and hides important information.

Now in addition to all the other challenges that I have with development, I have to start looking for replacements that don't hate me, for both Jira and BitBucket.