R&D Startup Disaster: A Costly Mistake in Data Collection
2025-07-13
An R&D startup conducting a psychology study lost all collected data due to a simple yet devastating bug. Their PHP code used `mail() or die()`, causing the script to terminate prematurely when an email failed to send (due to lack of internet access in the testing environment). This resulted in no data being saved to the database. The experience highlighted the importance of graceful error handling and thorough testing across different environments. The team learned from the costly mistake, improved their coding practices, and transitioned away from PHP to safer languages like JavaScript, Go, and Python.
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Development
data loss