What is one embarrassing thing you have done as a Software Engineer?

I was feeling fly this wonderful day and a random thought floated before me. It was a time I tried to minify C code to reduce the size and make it more performant.

It is typical folly in hindsight and it struck me to ask the same of developers I know and I have compiled responses to this one question: What is one embarrassing thing you have done as a Software Engineer?

Embarrasing list

Below is an exhaustive list:

1. "Push node modules to github as a noob."

2. "Pushed the virtualenv to Github. When it was taking so much time I thought “This can’t be right, pushing all these megabytes for a new project”, so I searched on Google and that’s how I learned about .gitignore"

3. "I once had an error pointing to the node modules folder and I updated the code in node modules... Then ran npm install.

4. "Deleted test files because my feature was not passing and I needed to push 😭"

5. "I had an issue with an Emitter. It kept timing out without running the emitted function. So I increased the timeout value directly from node_modules."

6. "Git push force to prod server... and our prod DB was apparently just SQLite (which I had now added to the .gitignore file)"

7. "As a budding software engineer, I thought I could build an operating system that would rival Android. It was going to be glorious. I spent months designing the UI. Not a single line of code. And if you know anything about OS dev, UI is the easy part"

8. "I already had a GitHub account, but I didn't know what it did. I used zipped folders for version control of the application I was working on"

9. "Deleted package.lock because i didn’t know what it did and the build for production broke"

10. "Refused to learn Git Bash, kept using GitHub UI to push code. A mistake or network error meant I'd delete and reupload every thing"

11. "Deleting my local project and cloning from github again anytime I have a git problem. Especially the time I tried git stash and I didn't see my changes in the new branch. I wrote the code afresh and never used git checkout/branch for a while"

12. "Not really embarrassing. I used to write code with Notepad because I felt like VSCode is cheating and gonna make me really dumb."

13. "My early days with Git, I mistakenly moved to another branch of a project and I couldn't find the code that took me two days to write, I thought I'd lost everything so I had to rewrite it."

14. "Been learning DevOps for a while and I got emails from AWS about budget limits. I ignored them since I would usually pick the 'free' stuffs on AWS. The mail showed $4 and I thought all was well. I worked on autoscaling groups next and I shut down the instances I used. I didn't log back in for about 3 days. Apparently, since it is autoscaling, for each instance I shut down, another took its place and I left it on for 3 days..."

It can be pretty hilarious reading this list and it brings back fond memories only because you are more experienced.

However, if you're still victims of the above, it's a great time to learn that there's a better way to address these problems.