{"id":41,"date":"2008-05-29T14:12:22","date_gmt":"2008-05-29T19:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/?p=41"},"modified":"2008-05-29T14:12:54","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T19:12:54","slug":"the-greater-than-gator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/2008\/05\/the-greater-than-gator\/","title":{"rendered":"The Greater-Than Gator"},"content":{"rendered":"

I lost a lot of time yesterday thanks to tracking down an alligator in an import utility. There was one itsy-bitsy little function that wreaked big havoc, thanks to a confused gator that didn’t know which way to look.
\nGreater Than Alligator
\nThat’s right, there was a < when there should have been a >. (Or since it was ColdFusion code, there was a LT where there should have been a GT.)<\/p>\n

The import utility was developed by a guy with a masters degree in computer science, so it just goes to show you that no amount of expertise can prevent such an error (or, quite possibly in this case, a typo).<\/p>\n

It was an easy fix, of course, but fixing all the data that had been incorrectly imported in the past took a bit longer. It cost me a few hours, but that’s better than causing a credit crisis<\/a>. Either way, it reinforced in my mind the idea that we could use some unit testing around here. Sure, it might take a little extra time to write the tests, but probably less than the amount of time I spent hunting down the pesky little gator and fixing the mess it left in its wake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I lost a lot of time yesterday thanks to tracking down an alligator in an import utility. There was one itsy-bitsy little function that wreaked big havoc, thanks to a confused gator that didn’t know which way to look. That’s right, there was a < when there should have been a >. (Or since it … Continue reading The Greater-Than Gator<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}