🎉 Announcing the Winner of "My Most Hilarious Coding Failure" Contest! 🎉

[mynynachau]

Imagine this: you’re at your desk, deep in the coding zone, when suddenly everything goes “oh no”. Your program crashes, bizarre results pop up, and confusion reigns supreme. Sound familiar? Well, that's exactly what we asked you to share, and wow, did you deliver!

Over the past month, we've been laughing, learning, and celebrating coding mishaps through our "My Most Hilarious Coding Failure" contest. Thank you to everyone who participated and embraced the lighter side of coding. Your stories have not only entertained us but also reminded us that every failure is a step towards success and a source of laughter.

And now, it's time to announce the winner! 🏆

🥇🥇🥇Congratulations to Sandra Solis 🥇🥇🥇

Your story about a tiny forgotten debugging loop that brought entire systems to their knees had us in stitches and received the most kudos from our community. Here's the winning entry in full:

Winning Entry with the title “Killer Cycles”: "When I was new to SAP, I wrote my first program. It was supposed to run in a job, not in a dialog screen, and everything seemed perfect. But there was one tiny problem: I forgot to comment out a debugging loop I used to check if everything was okay. Feeling confident, I asked the client to transport the program to PRD. As soon as they executed the job, it started consuming all the system memory until the entire system collapsed. No one could log in, and everybody was mad and crazy, and I was really calm, because I didn't know what was happening, as I said, I was new. Then, another company was called in to terminate the job and restart the system. And believe it or not, this happened with two other clients as well. LOL! Lesson learned: always double-check your code for killer cycles before going live!"
by @Sandra_Solis 

I’d also like to highlight two stories that received many kudos by the community as well:

2nd place entry with the title ‘The Carrot Catastrophe’:

“I was once working with a client in the frozen foods industry, tasked with integrating their SAP S/4HANA system with Warehouse Management System (WMS). The project was in its final stages, and just before the go-live date, we were testing various scenarios to ensure everything would run smoothly. Little did I know, a minor error in my Groovy script would lead to something weird.

During the testing phase, we began sending delivery IDocs from SAP. The process seemed pretty simple, however, in my code, I did not verify the quantitites.

I soon received a call from a client representative. The reason? Their system received an order for several thousand tons of carrots. Yes, carrots. Apparently, due to a misconfiguration in my script, the system had interpreted some field values incorrectly, resulting in an astronomical order of this vegetable.

The most amusing part of the story was that this order, worth only a few euros, had triggered the dispatch of dozens of trucks filled to the brim with carrots. Imagine if this scenario was in productive system, people standing before dozens of trucks lined, ready to deliver an absurd amount of carrots.

In the end, the situation was resolved without too much trouble. The script was corrected, the delivery orders were recalibrated, and the carrots were redirected.

This experience taught me the lesson of double-checking data outputs, no matter how technical the process might be.

And of course, it left me with a funny little story that I’ll never forget - the day I accidentally ordered a mountain of carrots.” By @MarianVatafu 

3rd place entry with the title ‘The Tale of the Disappearing Data: An Epic Developer Saga from the World of CAP😆’:

“Picture this: you're deep in the trenches of SAP Cloud Application Programming, crafting a shiny new CAP application for a customer. You've sprinkled in some initial master data for rapid prototyping, confident that everything is running smoothly. After some time, you hand over the application to your customer, eagerly awaiting their high-quality master data input using the Fiori Elements UI to prepare for some real world testing.

But as fate would have it, a bug reared its ugly head during testing. No problem, you think! You roll up your sleeves and deploy a bugfix. Victory is imminent...or so it seems. Suddenly, disaster strikes! All the master data is gone, replaced with your initial csv-data. Panic sets in as you remember the infamous HDI deployment caveat for csv data.

You scramble to apologize profusely to the customer, hastily moving all your csv files away from the db folder. Phew, crisis averted! The customer diligently re-enters their high-quality master data, and you prepare for another deployment. But alas, the nightmare isn't over. The master data vanishes again, leaving you bewildered and the customer frustrated.

Determined to conquer this beast, you dive into the depths of the HDI container, deleting the entire instance on Cloud Foundry in a desperate bid to solve the issue once and for all. In the aftermath of this chaos, inspiration strikes. From the ashes of your trials, the HDI Container Backup & Restore Application is born, a testament to the relentless spirit of a developer who refused to let data disappear without a fight.

And thus, a hero emerged from the world of SAP, armed with a new tool and a story to tell at this developer contest. May your backups be ever plentiful, and your data forever safe!” By @Ben 

As the winner, @Sandra_Solis  will receive an SAP merchandise voucher worth 40 euros!🎁 

A big shoutout to everyone who shared their tales of coding gone wrong, left comments, and gave kudos. Your engagement has made this contest a resounding success! All contest participants will receive the "Coding Failure Connoisseur" badge as a token of our appreciation for sharing your wonderful stories. Applause to all participants! @M-K , @JBLLINI , @matt , @abdulbasit , @JimSpath , @sabarna17 , @EnnoWulff , @Ben , @MarianVatafu , @Sandra_Solis 

Here’s to embracing every bug and every bizarre error as part of our journey in coding.

Happy coding, and congratulations again to @Sandra_Solis !

Your SAP Community Team

Eager to enter the next contest? Join the contest: “My most clever response in a job interview”!