This is a cute video that came across my Twitter feed at a very appropriate time. I had just explained to someone that they cannot tell us “the customer isn’t very specific about what they’re sending us, so you need to fix it”, when discussing processing data through an API.
I explained that this isn’t really how things work – we can absolutely fix the data, but we need to know what we’re trying to fix, how we can infer the correct answer, etc. The example I used was “When you drove to work this morning, you didn’t think about all the things you did to get there, you just did them. We can’t do that, we must define every step along the way.” Fortunately he got it, and immediately started noodling through how to convert imprecise or missing data into something usable (working with a product manager).
Anyway, here’s the video – watch all the way to the end! https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1411772304531595264?s=10