[seanhunter]

I had been working for a company in the early dotcom boom for about 2 weeks when they did a small public offering on an off-market exchange. Just before the investor roadshow we discovered a bug in the system (not the one I was hired to develop, their existing product that they thought was good to GTM) whereby if two people tried to access the website at once the database would become corrupted and the CGI process (yes it was written as a perl cgi) would just spin consuming CPU and not return and the only way to fix it was to kill the the process, dump and reload the db and then restart the process again.[1] So during the roadshow I was tailing the logs and keeping an eye on the website and if the problem occurred I would text my colleague who was doing the actual pitch “keep talking” if they needed to suddenly stop the demo while I did the dump and reload in the background and “good now” if they could carry on. Roadshow was an entire day of me doing this every couple of minutes (probably 8 hours or so but it felt much longer).

Offering was successful and I immediately ported the code to mysql straight afterwards which fixed the problem.

[1] Database was msql (no mysql, msql). I have no idea why somebody thought that was a good idea.