What are some things you've taken granted for only to find out later?

A couple of things I’d put in this category, from my experience —

1. I have never considered the possibility of server time going off from actual time, until the day my code kept failing in production because of a time signature being in the future. It took me a while to figure out that time was off, and when I googled it … turns out Time Synchronisation is a thing you set up in your servers. Luckily there were immediate and simple solutions, and I included it in my deployment scripts from then on.

2. This is probably a good example of bad api design. I was integrating a third party api for hotel search. This api was designed such that pricing info can be fetched but making a GET request with hotel ID. ‘Search is always a GET’ I had this almost set in my mind, so it didn’t feel wrong. But only when I built a search query for all the hotels in London (they were about 650 hotels), did I see what was wrong. HTTP 414 — Request URL too long. Turns out servers have limits on lengths of URLs. See this.

What about you? Start a conversation here, or on twitter @srik_anth