Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and therefore to a new instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly column that shares your tales of workplace errors and absolution.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ray" who reached the end of a temporary contract working at what he described as "a major corporation."
Ray was ready to move on to whatever came next, when the mega-corp asked if he could do just one more day of work to troubleshoot a production issue. He kindly agreed and showed up again.
To address the issue, Ray needed a production database connection string – code that includes the name and address of a database, plus credentials to log onto it. He therefore copied the string into his configuration file and spent a few hours fixing the problem.
"I quickly checked in my changes and headed out," he told Who, Me? Checking in those changes meant the major corporation's source control tools added his bug fix to its code base and default base configuration.
Ray had therefore made it possible for anyone else at the major corporation who could use that code to access his production database connection string.
He thought nothing of it until a few days later a former colleague from the major corporation called. Someone had used Ray's code and mistakenly used it to delete a database table, crippling an app that relied on it.
Readers may be wondering why we used the epithet "major corporation" so many times in this story.
We did to prepare you for the impact of that table deletion: 350,000 users could not access an app they relied on.
"They were down for pretty much a full workday," he told Who, Me?
Fortunately, the major corporation had good backups. And of course Ray didn't work there any more, so this incident was not his problem!
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Source: The register