Watch out: Starter code from online courses can nuke your project

I spent three days debugging last month. Found out a beginner tutorial's snippet had an infinite loop buried in it. It ate through my whole test database. 47 GB of sample data gone. Anyone else ever trust a tutorial too much and regret it?

2 comments

2 Comments

hart.taylor23d ago

My buddy Kyle grabbed a starter template from some "learn to code fast" course and thought he was being smart by just adding his stuff on top of it. Three days before his project demo, he pushed an update and suddenly his whole app started calling random APIs in a loop. It auto-generated like 80,000 fake user accounts before he could kill the server. The instructor never mentioned the sneaky cron job hidden in the setup file. Kyle still brings it up at parties like it's a war story.

maxpalmer23d ago

Gotta disagree with you @hart.taylor, I think Kyle got exactly what he paid for with that template. The whole point of those "learn fast" courses is they cut corners, and a hidden cron job is basically the wild west version of a feature. He should've checked the setup file before pushing to production, that's just basic dev hygiene regardless of the template quality.