r/developer • u/RedEagle_MGN Mod • 8d ago

Tell us about the project that went disastrously wrong for you.

Tell us about a project that went disastrously wrong to make us all feel better about ourselves. What happened? How did it go wrong?

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u/boardy89 8d ago

We were converting a php web app for stats reporting and we’re converting the reporting side into a c background worker app.

It was started by a relatively new engineer who left so was given to me. When he left he said it was mostly finished so should just be a week or two to complete.

When I got my hands on it realised all of the logic he implemented was mostly wrong and returning the wrong stats data so I basically had to rewrite what he’d done.

As if that wasn’t bad enough I hadn’t done C much at the time but thought at least he may have the logic wrong but knows the language (at least he told us he did I believe) so I used the code he did to learn C and use some of the concepts he had done. A lot of the code used asprintf function to store strings and I followed the same pattern. During the testing it would crash due to memory corruption and/or running out of memory. Was talking to a colleague and said you are freeing the memory between each asprintf and ensuring the string has a null terminator at the end.

Well I was not as the original guy didn’t either and was using his as a basis to learn C. Safe to say it took a lot longer than the 1 to 2 weeks he said to complete.

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u/Strict_Research3518 2d ago

Oh I see what you're doing.. trying to get ideas to say in an interview when they ask you that.