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Programmer excuses (programmerexcuses.com)
141 points by hjc89 on July 3, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 66 comments



My favorite excuse so far: http://i.imgur.com/X0aFVfy.png


"it was up when i went to bed!"


Me too, not sure if it's a very clever joke, or the server is just being hammered by HN :s


They should add "We're on HN" to their list.


"Probably the log consumed its memory"


What did you type in wrong to get it to crash?


Ahhh I was about to post this. Well done!


Yup, got that too.


Great idea, but after trying it dozen times I still didn't get the most common excuse: "works fine on my machine"


Strange. It seems to be working for me.


I found it: "Everything looks fine on my end"


http://i.imgur.com/SIYIz37.png


You know sometimes it is a polite way to say that " it is YOU who messed it up, so why don't you analyze what you have or have not done and try to fix it"


I've found "It worked yesterday", it's all of the same vriant.

My personal favourite is "Everything worked fine in the dev environment"


"That worked perfectly when I developed it" is in there.


This is why Vagrant / Chef is so great.


Yesir. I'm using Puppet myself and it's saving me boatloads of time and energy and brainwracking.

The fact that it can be used not just for Vagrant but for setting up your nodes on a cloud infrastructure is kind of overpowered :D


That's an interesting webpage. it has a hidden google ads-field in an iframe. I'm not web-savy enough to fully understand how it works.

The "click me as often as you can" contents for sure generate a lot of clicks. genius!


I see my GET request for show_ads.js is failing. So perhaps that nonloading javascript is suppose to make it appear but it's non working at the moment... Now, which excuses from the site would apply here?

Here's the first one that might make sense that showed up on my refresh: "It worked yesterday"

UPDATE: Must be Ad Block blocking it.


Are you using Adblock or similar software?


Yup, it was Ad Block.


I'm not sure its hidden on purpose. There doesn't appear to be any styling to hide it, and when I went to the URL that the inner iframe was linking to (the iframe inside of the iframe), it gave a blank page.


I think Google banned the domain from Adsense. I had a neglected UGC site that gradually became inundated with shady links and content, and this happened to me. Perhaps a site with low clicks and repeated, short-lived ad serves is worth banning.


Sounds like something the advertisers wouldn't be very happy about...


I was wondering why they didn't use jquery/JS to load data from a list rather than reload the page and create more web server hits. This would explain why.


I got 500 Internal Server Error with an additional 404 Not Found for the ErrorDocument, I had to wonder if that was a real excuse or genuine server error! Theirs a certain amount of irony to it anyway.


Actually, that's a feature


That comment really made me laugh.


Me too. Excuses for lazy system administrators: http://imgur.com/nWU9EH2

EDIT: just the screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/nWU9EH2.png


Indeed... http://tinypic.com/r/2yv88c7/8


Related (and my favorite): Things to Say When You're Losing a Technical Argument

http://www.pigdog.org/auto/mr_bads_list/shortcolumn/1914.htm...


git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n '/<a.>/{s/<[^>]>//g;p}')"


I would prefer it to give just the message when the request contains the `Accept: text/plain` header.


I'd like to commit a bugfix:

  git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;p}')"


And for any OS X user (* BSD based sed)

  curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n -e '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;' -e 'p' -e '}'

  git commit -m "$(curl -s programmerexcuses.com | sed -n -e '/<a.*>/{s/<[^>]*>//g;' -e 'p' -e '}')"


Or you can use it in your post-commit hook:

https://gist.github.com/stevelaz/daecc32e0a8f2758b649


www.whatthecommit.com alternative to this:

  git commit -m "$(curl -s http://whatthecommit.com | grep -o '<p>.*' | sed 's|<[^>]*>||g')"


You read my mind.

I would have preferred a more client-aware response, similar to http://ifconfig.me/, so that you can save the sed call.


On one reload I got a standard internal server error message. Next reload it was gone. If that was on purpose, it is a nice touch.


I got this twice and I went to go look at the response to see if it was actually a 200 implying that it was purposeful, but once I loaded up the dev console to see the headers I couldn't reproduce.


Try DoSing the page by holding down F5 for a second or two...

Status comes back as 500 not 200.


I don't believe it's intentional. The server had can't handle much load.


12 months ago while I was bored on a SFO to JFK flight I made a clone relevant to where I was working at the time http://frsexcuses.com which got featured by 9to5Mac [1] and still to this day gets a little bit of traffic as the domain is about to expire

[1]: http://9to5mac.com/2013/08/02/frs-excuses-website-showcases-...


Where is "It works on my box"? I'm guilty of using that one a few times.

Edit: "It's user error" is another popular one.


"The bug must come from changes colleague XY has made after me! pointingfingers"


Reminded of the old BOFH calendar with daily excuses: "Sunspots."


Nice site, but seems weird wrapping the text in a <href> and wrapping that in a center. As somebody else said on the comments, why couldn't be just plain text/have a plain text header?


"That wasn't in the specification"

An excuse being an attempt to justify a fault, I don't consider that an excuse. That one is a fact, and it's not the programmers fault when it happens.


Here is the full list of excuses: https://gist.github.com/Dorian/28a49b82ee9f026e5823


I got "The third-party API is not responding" the first time, and I thought for a second that it was a 500-class server error. Then I reloaded, and laughed.


I have actually seen something that was thought to be an application error tracked down to a faulty firewall device - that was a fun bug to investigate :-)


Similar:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl


I used to have a BOFH excuse calendar. A classic.


"I heard there was a solar flare today"


Everything looks fine on my end! It looks like its a browser compatibility issue.

Ha! I said both of these this morning. No I am blaming the plugin.


Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Is this another excuse?


Some of those give me a twinge of embarrassment: "I didn't receive a ticket for that," indeed.


It's amazing how many of these I've said with a straight face. Guess I am a lazy programmer.


The first time I loaded the page I was expecting some writeup on programmer excuses, instead I was presented with a page that said "Our servers are too slow to cope with the demand" or something similar and I thought "OK, a bit too honest calling their servers slow, but the message is clear" so I decided to wait a bit until HN traffic died down


What about the heisenbugs, the ones which disappear as soon as I try to debug them?


First time hearing "Heisenbugs", think I'm gonna hang onto that one.


looks like an Ad click generator since DoubleClick is hidden in the page.


Is there a "hey, it passed all the unit tests"?


Does anyone know where to find the full list of excuses?


"Internal Server Error" is also an excuse?


You say lazy like it's a bad thing.




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