Ryan recently received some thorough documentation from a client regarding a third-party API he had been tasked with integrating.

He found it quite helpful that the documentation included an Excel spreadsheet that listed the accepted values for each input field. Particularly helpful was the page on acceptable values for the "dob_dd" (Date of birth -day) field, which lists the "title" of each day and its corresponding "value".

Now we all know that some developers are not the best, and occasionally make less-than-stellar design decisions, but was this level of detail truly necessary or helpful?

Spreadsheet png

I can't help but wonder what they did to document any fields where you could enter an arbitrary integer, or worse, a decimal number...

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