- Implement API for displaying an information widget in customer company’s own website (big pharma regent suppliers), content get injected as an iframe loaded from our site.
- Customer employees all visit their own website from behind a reverse proxy with the same IP, trigger the (poorly configured) rate limiting
- Panicky customer contact: “Why is your widget displaying cat pictures on our website and could you please stop it right now”
This now forms a key foundation in my “no whimsy in code” rule along with one or two near misses with dummy data/content.
One of my coworkers, a UX designer, used to work at a newspaper. They used Osama Bin Laden’s FBI most wanted photo as a placeholder image to avoid accidentally running prints without photos because it was funny and because, you know, who could miss that? Well, everyone, it turns out. Some poor guy got Osama’s photo in his obituary and that was the end of that.
Hahah. Reminds me of the time I used to work at a place where the software's demo company was called ISIS and that didn't used to be a big deal until ISIS itself became a thing. Part of our solution contained a web-portal we could up-sell to our clients that their end users could manage their accounts through etc. Anyway I remember one fun afternoon hacking graphics of ISIS the terrorist organization into the web-portal of the demo org and showing it around the office for laughs. It never made it to a customer site thankfully and it was pretty funny at the time but my boss told me to cut it out pretty quick just in-case hahaha.
Comments
Reminds me of my most customer-visible screwup.
- Implement rate limiting on a site to deal with scrapers
- Include the https://http.cat/429 in the template for 429 responses.
- Time passes
- Implement API for displaying an information widget in customer company’s own website (big pharma regent suppliers), content get injected as an iframe loaded from our site.
- Customer employees all visit their own website from behind a reverse proxy with the same IP, trigger the (poorly configured) rate limiting
- Panicky customer contact: “Why is your widget displaying cat pictures on our website and could you please stop it right now”
This now forms a key foundation in my “no whimsy in code” rule along with one or two near misses with dummy data/content.
One of my coworkers, a UX designer, used to work at a newspaper. They used Osama Bin Laden’s FBI most wanted photo as a placeholder image to avoid accidentally running prints without photos because it was funny and because, you know, who could miss that? Well, everyone, it turns out. Some poor guy got Osama’s photo in his obituary and that was the end of that.
Hahah. Reminds me of the time I used to work at a place where the software's demo company was called ISIS and that didn't used to be a big deal until ISIS itself became a thing. Part of our solution contained a web-portal we could up-sell to our clients that their end users could manage their accounts through etc. Anyway I remember one fun afternoon hacking graphics of ISIS the terrorist organization into the web-portal of the demo org and showing it around the office for laughs. It never made it to a customer site thankfully and it was pretty funny at the time but my boss told me to cut it out pretty quick just in-case hahaha.
It's also a routing protocol: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IS-IS