Almost without fail I see certain errors repeated on every single software project I come across. The projects that successfully dodge these pitfalls almost always do so because someone on the team fell into them once before and swore they wouldn’t do so again. Those of you who haven’t yet been burned by this class of error will almost certainly protest about complexity or wierd design choices in the code made by those who have.

Who are these heinous kingpins of crime in the bug ghettos of the software world? Its a work in progress, but the initial contenders are:

• Dates and times
• Money
• Concatenated strings as identifiers

Those of you who’ve been beset in the past are nodding right now, those who haven’t are probably saying, “they don’t seem very complicated.”

Which is exactly why they’ll get you sooner or later. Then you’ll remember this post, and you’ll nod.

It’s been kindly pointed out that my feeds and half my category links are broken and have been for a while. Probably nobody is left who still actually uses a browser to read blogs, but, as this dovetails rather precisely with my assumptions about readership size; and faffing with moveable type templates rates somewhat lower than not, it may take a while before it all gets sorted. Apologies to anyone who’s still committed enough to make the effort, I’ll try and get round to sorting it.