Wrong Assumptions Every Programmer Makes About the Real World

Every programmer has been burned by the real world’s beautiful messiness. You assume people have exactly two names until you meet Cher, Madonna, or someone from Indonesia. You think birthdays are simple until you encounter leap seconds, calendar reforms, and cultures that don’t celebrate the day you were born. You design elegant relational schemas until you discover that in reality, a person can have multiple genders, addresses change retroactively, and sometimes a customer is also a vendor.

This talk systematically destroys the comfortable assumptions we make when modeling reality in code, from the deceptively complex world of names (what’s a middle name in Spanish culture?) to the nightmare of global addresses (try fitting a Japanese address into US postal fields), from character encoding beyond ASCII (yes, emoji can break your database) to the harsh truth that requirements change not because stakeholders are indecisive, but because the world itself is indecisive.

Through real-world horror stories and hard-won wisdom, you’ll learn to embrace uncertainty, design for edge cases you haven’t imagined, and stop trying to force the chaotic beauty of human existence into neat, normalized tables.

• Programming
• Learning