HACKER Q&A
📣 crisp

What's your story about lost source code?


Inspired by the comments[1][2] about lost source code, what's your story? How did you or somebody else lose source code, and what were the implications?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28700830

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28701093


  👤 gherkinnn Accepted Answer ✓
Back in the good old days. Didn’t use versioning nor was there any staging to speak of.

I accidentally FTP’d a broken experimental state to production. I was able to retrieve some of the original code by using the internet archive. The rest was gone.

Nothing bad came of it though. Mistakes happen.


👤 gigatexal
I didn’t understand Git and branches at my first startup. Tech leads would assist on pairing on features. We’d commit and then for some reason I’d lose that data from the last day.

I am much much better at git now but I think one of the reasons I was let go was because I was always behind having to redo code over and over.