02 April 2007
If you write software assuming any of the following:
- English
- Acronyms
- Fixed timezone offsets (pssst... it's summer in Brasil and it's tomorrow in Australia)
- "AM" and "PM"
- Knowledge of US geography (Quick -- name all of the Canadian "states")
- Latin-1 or ASCII-7 (We'll just add the funny things over the vowels later)
- US-centric telephone & address formats (You mean it's not called a Zip code?)
- US-centric methods of payment
- US-centric legal frameworks (You can drink at 16 in England?)
- Feet, Pounds, Fahrenheit (How's that Mars probe doing?)
- Commas for decimals and periods for thousands-markers
- "Soccer"
- "Foreign" or "International" anything
...report to my cube immediately for re-education with this baseball bat.
