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Not bugs but I've encountered a consequence which is worse than a bug.

In a recent project I arrived at, I started seeing 612 in random places in the code. It was, naturally, the ID of a very specific user. Having an easy ID to remember, it is a temptation for sloppy programmers to just hardcode certain checks against a particular ID instead of following proper procedures. It was a bad project and a bad team, and after some 10 years or so, the code was now flooded with 612 and a couple of other IDs.

Sure, you could avoid such a thing with code revisions and such, but then again it's better to simply not put the temptation in front of the programmers, isn't it?




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