"Oh, what a tangled web we weave."
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook
No, wait, that was William Shakespeare. I'm trying to take a little vacation this week, and so I set an auto-responder on my business email account that automatically sends out an email to anyone who emails me, noting that I won't be in the office until next Monday. But I forgot that my only lightly used Facebook account has my business email address.
I also did not know notice that when Facebook sends you an email telling you someone has posted something of interest, that you can just reply to that email, rather than logging in to Facebook. Facebook takes your reply email and posts it on your wall or as a comment on someone else's wall.
Two handy little pieces of code, each handily doing their own thing. Until the two pieces of code meet each other. In a thread about my upcoming high school reunion, almost a dozen of my "I'm on vacation" notices have been posted in the last three days. Everytime someone comments on that thread, I get an email, and my vacation auto-responder responds, and my vacation notice gets posted yet again.
The fix was simple enough. I changed my Facebook email to my personal email account. But the complexity of our software continues to grow, and occasionally produces unpredictable results. Good testing of software is more important than ever.