this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
As someone who professionally writes code that has to ingest mail carrier invoices/other CSVs, this is probably the worst I’ve seen, but some of the files I’ve dealt with were … let’s say comparably frustrating.
Mostly it’s because mail carriers tend to write these files for humans/accountants to read and audit, so they’ll pull shit like putting in a whole differently-formatted chart above the actual CSV formatted table, or sending us password-protected, encrypted XSLX files that we need a human to decrypt using Excel before we can ingest it with our data tools.
Leave it to Japan to take it to the extreme by making their software in a fully bespoke way.
I was surprised by how many of these I already knew but also horrified at some of the things I have now read about
Like what?
The Japanese Postal CSV seems truly cursed
As someone who professionally writes code that has to ingest mail carrier invoices/other CSVs, this is probably the worst I’ve seen, but some of the files I’ve dealt with were … let’s say comparably frustrating.
Mostly it’s because mail carriers tend to write these files for humans/accountants to read and audit, so they’ll pull shit like putting in a whole differently-formatted chart above the actual CSV formatted table, or sending us password-protected, encrypted XSLX files that we need a human to decrypt using Excel before we can ingest it with our data tools.
Leave it to Japan to take it to the extreme by making their software in a fully bespoke way.