Tina needs to write some software that integrates with a hardware device. Thatdevice controls access via behind a PIN, and thus Tina's team needs to track the valid PIN, so that they can, via software, update or alter the PIN.

There's just one problem. That device has some opinions about how a Personal Identification Number should be represented:

Picking random items without repetition is its own special challenge. It's one of those things that's not actually hard, but some programmers have a difficult time coming up with solutions to the problem. Abraham has found these two examples in some code he maintains:

//pick 3 out of 4
    int alreadyUsed = 0;
    while (alreadyUsed < 3) {
        int rand = random()%4;
        if(!m_AllOptions[rand]->used) {
            m_AllOptions[rand]->used = true;
            alreadyUsed++;
        }
    }

A large company with facilities all over the Asia-Pacific region opted to modernize. They'd just finished a pile of internal development that extended the functionality of a 3rd party package, and they wanted to containerize the whole shebang.

That's where Fred came in, about 9 months into a 12 month effort. Things hadn't gone well, but a lot of the struggles were growing pains. Many of the containers were built as gigantic monoliths. A lot of the settings you might need to do a Kubernetes deployment weren't properly configured. It was a mess, but it wasn't a WTF, just a lot of work.

"Never trust your inputs" is a generally good piece of advice for software development. We can, however, get carried away.

Janice inherited a system which, among many other things, stores phone numbers. Like most such systems, the database validates phone numbers, and guarantees that numbers are stored in a canonical format, as text.