Thank you to everyone who joined our Spooky Stories Contest 👻 on Global Masters and shared your eerie tales with us! We loved diving into your mysterious, thrilling, and downright spooky stories. It was tough to pick just one winner, but we finally have a standout story to celebrate.

 And the winners are... 

🎉 Congratulations to @Robert Barbiaux and @Caro 
 Each of you has earned a spooky bonus of 500 points!

🏆Story by @Robert Barbiaux 

Twenty years ago, because of a software bug, I had to sort digital photos into the appropriate folders by eyeing them one by one, in the dead of the night. Those pictures came from a pathology lab macroscopy department, some of them are still haunting me and sending chills down my spine.

🏆Story by @Caro 

I once identified a bug in the codebase that had gone unnoticed for almost fifteen years. Looking at that old code felt like looking at the ghost of coders past. Truly spooky to imagine how it remained undetected for so long.

Feeling that eerie shiver? 👀💀
But it’s not just the winning stories that deserve attention! Here are some other very captivating entries from our participants:

Story by @Jason Neate 

In late October, as a student struggling to get a COBOL assignment to compile. I asked my tutor for help, but she was busy. Two days later, she sat down with me as I walked her through the code, explaining every stage. Mid-sentence, I froze, stunned. I turned to her, a look of horror in my eyes, and managed to stammer, “I.. I.. forgot a full stop. Slowly, I turned back to the screen, added the missing full stop, and hit "compile." It compiled. My tutor called it her “Fastest code review ever!”

Story by @Alessandra Carena 

I found the culprit behind our crashing app—a rogue print("Here!") statement buried in a function. Easy fix, right? I deleted it, saved, redeployed… but the logs still print “Here! Here! Here!”. A real nightmare! Finally, we discovered an old, hidden script on the test server, containing the original print("Here!"). We deleted it, refreshed the logs… silence at last. The bug was gone, but the horror lingers on.

Story by @Guillermo Velasco 

*Teams Notification Alert*

Story by @Vishal Pallerla 

Once, I rushed to fix a minor bug in the one of the tables in Prod SQL Server. I updated something using an update query UPDATE table SET column ='value'; I ran it forgetting the WHERE clause which updated entire table instead of just one record that was supposed to. My heart raced as I realized it and updated the data from back up, learning the hard way the importance of double-checking queries.

Story by @Danny Wijnschenk 

oops, i passed the *dead* line !

Happy Halloween, and stay tuned for more exciting activities!

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