Probably most commonly is fixing bugs on websites in dev tools. Often if something on a website is broken I can hack an API call together or fix up some HTML and do what I was trying to do. This happened recently when I was trying to download a bill, but the website wasn't working correctly. I was able to look into dev tools and find the broken API call and fix it.
I think my my favourite real life use of tech was many years ago when I was taking some kids to see Santa and stupidly assumed it would be possible to just turn up.
We got there and I was told they were fully booked that day and that I had to buy tickets online. I went on their website and noticed that the day was greyed out so I couldn't click it. When I clicked other days that were available though I saw that it was just navigating me to a page with a query string for the selected date.
Obviously at this point I tried to change the query string to todays date and to my surprise got through to a similar page, but instead for selecting time slots. Again all the time slots were greyed out so then I found out the query string for that from another day with available slots.
In the end I managed to get through to the checkout page and booked tickets for same day. The staff were very confused when we turned back up with tickets, especially since they were now over capacity which shouldn't have been possible. But they acknowledged the tickets were valid so everyone got to see Santa.
Stuff like this is rarely ever possible today unfortunately. In the past you could often even alter the payment total at checkout security was so poor. Not that I ever did that, but I realised it was possible a few times.
I think my my favourite real life use of tech was many years ago when I was taking some kids to see Santa and stupidly assumed it would be possible to just turn up.
We got there and I was told they were fully booked that day and that I had to buy tickets online. I went on their website and noticed that the day was greyed out so I couldn't click it. When I clicked other days that were available though I saw that it was just navigating me to a page with a query string for the selected date.
Obviously at this point I tried to change the query string to todays date and to my surprise got through to a similar page, but instead for selecting time slots. Again all the time slots were greyed out so then I found out the query string for that from another day with available slots.
In the end I managed to get through to the checkout page and booked tickets for same day. The staff were very confused when we turned back up with tickets, especially since they were now over capacity which shouldn't have been possible. But they acknowledged the tickets were valid so everyone got to see Santa.
Stuff like this is rarely ever possible today unfortunately. In the past you could often even alter the payment total at checkout security was so poor. Not that I ever did that, but I realised it was possible a few times.