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Episode 86: Scary Code

Episode 86: Scary Code

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 On this episode of the Acima Development podcast, the crew leans into a Halloween “code horror” theme, using real-world stories to explore the scariest things they’ve seen in software. Mike opens with a literal horror from homeownership: a drain pipe so clogged with roots it had become a pipe-shaped root sculpture, a perfect metaphor for an ancient 3,000+ line Rails controller crammed with overlapping workflows, unclear entry points, and so much tangled logic that a junior engineer couldn’t ship a single change in months. That sets the stage for an episode about legacy systems, complexity, and the way neglected codebases slowly turn into haunted houses you’re afraid to enter. From there, the hosts trade progressively more terrifying war stories from their careers. Dave recalls a nightmare installer project where he had to write Pascal inside InstallShield to find and kill a running Rails process on Windows using SQL against the process table—an absurdly convoluted solution that nevertheless shipped and worked. Justin shares high-stakes fintech deployments where downtime cost millions per minute, quarterly release windows created brutal pressure, and failed rollouts meant rolling back three months of work. Kyle talks about discovering hard-coded secrets and shared keys scattered across repos, unrotated for years, then being told to fix and rotate them all “by end of day” with almost no historical context. Mike adds tales of a reporting system literally built on SQL injection, “fixed” by an enormous hand-rolled SQL builder that was later thrown away, and a credit card gateway acquisition where an injection flaw had already been exploited to steal over a million dollars. The horror then zooms out to systemic and operational failures: clickstream data sold by ad blockers that can easily de-anonymize users, HIPAA-reportable incidents that nearly trigger federal oversight, and outsourcing critical code to poorly vetted contractors only to see entire codebases appear on the dark web. They dig into how floating point differences between systems can change financial reports by a few dollars, how time zones and users changing their device clocks can break “simple” expiry logic, and how massive vulnerability scans can surface tens of thousands of “critical” issues across hundreds of repos. Add in AWS us-east-1 outages that turn disaster recovery plans into live-fire drills, layoffs that leave one engineer alone with a mysterious legacy system, and useless commit messages like “test” repeated 50 times, and you get a grim but funny campfire circle for engineers. They close by emphasizing the real moral behind the scares: every one of these stories carries a lesson about security, architecture, and process, so listeners can learn from others’ hot-stove moments instead of burning themselves the same way. Transcript: MIKE: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I'm hosting again today. With me, I have Justin, Dave. DAVE: Save yourselves. MIKE: And Kyle. And -- DAVE: I just realized this is not going to come out on Halloween. MIKE: [inaudible 00:37] DAVE: We are recording this on Halloween. MIKE: Exactly [laughter]. Well, that's what I was about to say. DAVE: Oh, sorry. MIKE: You're going to probably hear this in January, but we're recording this on Halloween [chuckles], Halloween of 2025, and so we're in a spooky mood [chuckles] with the Halloween theme. We're going to run with that, and, as usual, I wanted to connect this at least a little bit to something tangible. And what I was thinking of is, a couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning out a drain pipe. So, I've got a downspout from my house, and it goes into a perforated drain pipe that runs out to the edge...well, near the edge of the yard. So, when it rains, the water goes out near the edge of the yard rather than going down next to the house and going to the foundation. The problem is water was not going down the pipe, and [chuckles] that wasn't good. We tried to figure out why and noticed every time it rains, water is coming out the top of the pipe...at the bottom of the downspout rather than going up the other end. So, we ran a pipe snake up the end of the pipe, thought, okay, there's probably something in there, and gave it several tries. But one of the times I pulled, like, wow, that's really stuck in there, and I pulled it out. And I pulled out, like, a several-foot-long length of root that had fine roots shaped around the inside of a perforated pipe. It was [laughter] a very interesting pipe-shaped root. Oh, that's interesting, kind of creepy looking actually [chuckles]. This strange thing reminded me of an image I saw of some blood that somebody [inaudible 02:08] from a lung, you know, this very twisted intricate thing. And that still didn't even begin to get all the roots out of it. We were, like, oh, you know what, this is not going to work. Eventually, I just tore out the ...
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