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The Internal Review Said Clean. A Second Pass Found Six Real Bugs.
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It Looked Exactly Like a Bot Swarm. It Was SQL Server Parameter Sniffing.
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The bot swarm that turned out to be one bad query plan
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314 broken stats pages and one bad cursor
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The exit survey that overwrote a live mailer
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Codex flagged my ONLINE=ON, my own probe said it was fine, and the server proved us both wrong
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The Index Seek That Was Actually a Half-Table Scan (5000x, on a 4M-Row geoIP Table)
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7 games became 14: making a bulk insert idempotent with an origin key
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An Index Seek Can Still Read Far More Than You Expect
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The reuse story died, so I shipped a new cart instead
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Avoid Unnecessary Date String Round Trips
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The One-Shot Data-Repair Script as a First-Class Artifact
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Same Root Cause Is Not Same Fix: Verify the Data Shape, Not Just the Symptom
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When a Workflow Gap Needs an Operator Tool: Preview, Policy, and an Audit Trail
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The decorative database: when your blocklist table isn't actually on the request path
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The fix that ran on every request
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A 25-Second Admin Screen Meant We Trusted the Wrong Query
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The Fastest Legacy Hotfix Is Often a Diagnostic
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The call was coming from inside the house
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The rate-limiter that banned our power users: 302 to 200 redirects look like an attack
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The Page Was Performing a Ceremony, Not a Job
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'Newest First' Is a Re-Priority Problem, Not an ORDER BY
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Shipping a Whole Analytics Suite Into a Legacy ASP Admin
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Server-Side JavaScript on Classic ASP in 2026: Prototype Pages and the DB Helper Pattern
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1900-01-01 Is Not a Date: The Zero-Datetime That Corrupts Every Migration
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From 3.5 million round-trips to hundreds: batching a remap with temp tables
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A code-first schema audit: keeping a 1,477-line ASP file in sync with a 14,536-column DB
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I Wrote a 1,477-Line Site-Recovery Engine in Classic ASP: Copy First, Remap IDs Second