
Ask HN: What was the most embarrassing thing you did early in your career? - gravy
I&#x27;m talking 0-3 years in!
======
DeathRabbit
Java dev at a trucking company. Their IT shop grew organically and stuff
wasn't exactly well-engineered at any level. We used Websphere on the AS/400
(system i now). When I arrived I found such fun practices as source control
being a shared network directory and 63.5k JSPs (because >64k JSPs bombed).

Anyway, they had no real test environment but relied on a byzantine set of
flags, logins, etc. to "test" in production. Being new and not used to the
ropes, I nonetheless thought I knew what I was doing.

I was making a change to a Bill of Lading input page. I filled up a load with
nonsense stuff like 50 barrels of beer and 10 containers of cats. Hit the
button, eyeballed the change, said "yep, done".

Boss comes around the next day asking who had made a shipment request for beer
and cats. I guess a truck had actually rolled around to the dist center to
pick up this load; I guess the system lacked the "what" and just listed the
quantities.

Whoops.

I was infamous for the beer and cats shipment for my entire time there,
everyone conveniently forgetting the insanity of their staging environment
setup.

TL;DR : Created a real shipment for 50 barrels of beer and 10 containers of
cats

~~~
gravy
How many cats are in a container of cats?

~~~
DeathRabbit
I would guess it depends if they're left whole and in-tact or not.

/s

