🟡 Spooktoberfest 2024

[MichelleMoudy]

UPDATE: This Spooktoberfest Fun Friday event is now officially over - as you may remember (from the description below) we left this open the entire week, ending Sunday 27 October in whatever timezone you are. So as now that date has officially passed us by, we have counted up all the entries and badges will be awarded within the week. Thank you so much for all the great pictures! It was great to see everyone’s spooky spirit!

For Week 4 of Devtoberfest, it’s Spooktoberfest! That means it’s time to share your favorite spooky tech stories, decorations, or costumes!

To participate, you only need to complete the following steps.

Step 1: You can do either one or all of the following: write about a spooky tech story, take a picture of some spooky decorations, or take a picture of you in a costume. The stories can be about anything that leans spooky, like weird bugs that happened for incredibly strange reasons, that time you saw a ghost in the server room, or a time your laptop crashed right after threatening it. The pictures can be of anything spooky, Halloween, or fall related, like house décor or someone in a costume (pets included!). This rule isn’t strict so interpret it as creatively as you’d like!

Step 2: Post your spooky material in the comments of this discussion post before EOD October 27th. If you’ve already posted your material elsewhere, feel free to link that in the comments.

Step 3 (optional): Check out the rest of the comments to get in that spooky mood for October 31st!

Be as creative or relaxed as you want. The only important thing is that you have fun.

For my own decorations, I have this shelving behind my desk that I like to decorate for meetings when I turn on my camera. For October, I decorated by shelves with a fall/Halloween theme. I like to think it helps get me and others into the holiday spirit.

I made those dino chicken nuggets myself and I am very proud of them

Note: You are not restricted to post this only during Friday, October 25th. This is open the entire third week of Devtoberfest, from October 21st through October 27th. We will award points and badges after that time.

Have fun and let’s all get into that spooky spirit!

[M-K]

[Benly_Panicker1]

Booo.....

 

[jaszczugey]

[VijayCR]

[AAncos]

 

[nicolasvanhimbeeck]

Two years ago we organised a walk in a forest in the dark. We had different parts for our colleagues to find their way between checkpoints. One of the parts contained all kind of horror pieces of code from different mistakes of our team. At the end of the walk a lot of our colleagues told they had a lot of fun with the "ABAP horror hallway".

[mdixit]

Here is a story :

Edmund Fairchild was a reclusive but gifted software developer in London, known for his eccentric research . Driven by a relentless ambition, he dedicated his life to crafting a program that could mimic the human mind—a mission sparked by the untimely passing of his younger sister, Clara. They had been inseparable, spending countless hours in their family’s basement lab, or “Fairchild’s Hollow,” working on groundbreaking code.

After Clara’s passing, Edmund’s obsession took on a life of its own. He claimed he could still feel her presence, noticing peculiar patterns in his code that resembled Clara’s way of thinking. His colleagues dismissed it as grief, but Edmund was certain he was on the brink of reconnecting with her spirit. Then, one misty Halloween night, Edmund disappeared.

Now, once a year, on All Hallows' Eve, the Fairchild’s Hollow is said to come alive. Locals report seeing faint lights and flickering computer screens through the dusty basement windows. Those brave enough to approach hear Clara’s soft laughter mingling with the faint clatter of Edmund’s keyboard as his shadowy figure, bound to his spectral work, toils away in the quest to bring Clara back. #Spooktoberfest

[Ria90]

Spooky but Cute 😀

#spooktoberfest

[jmusagre]

ABAP can be terrifying...

[ipravir]

Werewolf and I have left programming behind for a day, plunging into the dark. Now we are hunting for some spooky stuffs 😈👻🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃

[SyambabuAllu]

Spooktoberfest24#spooktoberfest

[Virinchy]

[ebe]

Hi everyone!

Halloween is really not an important thing here, so I have struggled to find something related in the house.

But... Here are the 2 butternuts of the apocalypse (I hope they will make a good soup):

Regards,

Eric

[divyajchndrn]

Enter if you dare… but BEWARE!

Boo-tiful night for a fright!

When your code runs perfectly... until midnight 🕛💀

Did the ghost in the server room strike again?

Nothing is scarier when your laptop crash after saying, " I didn’t save it yet!" 💀

##SpookyDebugging #HalloweenHorrors

#Devtoberfest2024 #Spooktobefest 

[hereAnshul]

Since the event says, 

---

The pictures can be of anything spooky, Halloween, or fall related, like house décor or someone in a costume (pets included!). This rule isn’t strict so interpret it as creatively as you’d like!

So I'll be celebrating Diwali on the same day as Halloween, I am posting a small decoration we did last year near our home's entrance. This year's home cleaning is still going on with decorations to follow. (that's it, mom's calling, bye) Flower Petals and Earthen Oil Lamps

[Flavio]

[Micha_Reisner]

The Forgotten User

Chapter 1: A Harmless Ticket
It was a cold, rainy evening when Sarah received the ticket. The ABAP developer had been working for seven years at the company, and the SAP system was ancient, with most problems repeating endlessly. But this time was different. The ticket was unusual: an outdated user who hadn’t shown any activity for years had suddenly appeared in a nightly log. “Z_SHADOW,” Sarah read the user’s designation. The system had logged this account in the early hours of the morning, without any changes made to the code or permissions. No one could explain why this user was suddenly active again.

Sarah shrugged. It was probably just a glitch, a typical artifact from a system that was far too old. Routinely, she began to comb through the logs to find out where the login had come from.

Chapter 2: Unexplained Anomalies
As Sarah sifted through the logs, the discrepancies piled up. “Z_SHADOW” was a user who had last been active over ten years ago. Back then, Thomas Reinhardt, a former colleague, had used this account shortly before he mysteriously disappeared. Thomas was experienced but had a dangerous curiosity. On the night of his disappearance, during a late-night system upgrade, he had been left alone – and had never been heard from again.

Weird function calls kept appearing in the logs. Sarah tried to deactivate the user, but the system wouldn’t respond. Each time she attempted it, her screen flickered, and a message appeared, as if it were a part of the system itself:
“Stop, before it gets you too.”
Sarah’s heart raced. The message felt old, as if someone had tried to leave a warning years ago. She knew that Thomas was the last person who had worked with “Z_SHADOW.”

Chapter 3: The Messages
Over the following days, the messages piled up. They came out of nowhere, always without a sender, always darker:
“He caught me. It lives. Get away.”
Sarah couldn’t stop digging, but the warnings grew louder, more urgent:
“You’re getting closer. It will catch you.”
As she examined Thomas's code, she realized he had developed a program that penetrated areas of the system that no one had ever accessed before – an experiment that had burrowed deep into the software’s core. She was convinced that Thomas had never really left. Something in the system was holding him captive. But what was “it”? What was inside?

Chapter 4: The Halloween Night
One evening, Sarah discovered that Thomas had disappeared on Halloween – the night of a system upgrade. The deeper she dug, the clearer it became that something had happened that night. “Z_SHADOW” had left disturbing traces in the logs. The system seemed to have transformed itself.

Then came another message, different from the others:
“There’s no escape. You must find me.”
The sentence sent a chill down her spine. She wanted to stop, but something within her forced her to continue. Shortly after, a link appeared on her screen. An old, long-forgotten URL in the system.
“Follow me. Get to know my world.”

Chapter 5: The Portal
Sarah couldn’t resist the urge. She clicked on the link. The system, her familiar workplace, began to change. The screen distorted, and an abstract pattern formed – a kind of digital portal. A rumble filled the room, and her eyes fixed on the pulsating code on the monitor. It was as if the system had come alive and was calling to her.
“Come. See what I have seen.”
With a sense of dread, she clicked on “Confirm.” In that moment, she felt reality around her fade. Everything became a whirlpool of data and light. Her office dissolved, and she was pulled into the digital world.

 Chapter 6: Trapped in the System
When Sarah opened her eyes, she was no longer in the office. She found herself in an endless landscape of floating data streams and sharp, geometric structures stretching into infinity. The ground was made of flickering code, and the sky was an impenetrable web of glowing numbers.

And then she saw him.
But it was not the Thomas she had seen in old photos. His body was distorted, a grotesque mix of man and machine. Fragments of code ran through his body, his eyes flickering like broken monitors, and his skin seemed to dissolve into pixels. He had become part of this world – or it had consumed him.
“I warned you, Sarah,” he said, his voice echoing through the system. “Now there’s no turning back.”
His eyes, empty and cold, bore into hers. Suddenly, Sarah felt her own body begin to change. Her hands, once real, flickered and pixelated. She felt the same pull that had taken hold of Thomas’s body – as if the system were trying to devour her. Her thoughts grew sluggish, the roar of data streams like an echo reverberating in her head.

“You are now a part of me, a part of this world,” Thomas said. “We all become code when we dig too deep.”
Sarah wanted to scream, to run, but her legs would no longer obey. Her body slowly dissolved, the environment blurred, and all she felt was the suffocating cold of the system. She was trapped. Forever.

The last message she saw on the screen before she disappeared entirely was just a single word:
“Welcome.”

[galenprabhu]

[ram3355]

[arief_nkn]

[ruben_alvarez]

 

[vishalakshmi]

Thanks,

vishala.