Let’s have a little non-election content, shall we?
The long tail of edge cases and the people who fix them.
Indulge yourself for a moment in this delightful story, courtesy of Jeremy Singer, who, along with many others, has been working to get the FAFSA stable for college students.
As you may know, the Department of Education rolled out a new FAFSA --- what high school seniors and college students use to apply for financial aid nationally --- last fall. It went badly. But this is a comeback story, at least for now. They’ve gotten some help from a tech leadership team on leave from the College Board, from the USDS, from a new internal digital team they’re standing up. There are still lots of legacy ways of working at FSA that will need to change, but right now, things are going much better. Students are able to apply and expect to get their financial aid packages in time to make decisions about college choices next spring.
Fixing something like the FAFSA starts out with big fixes, some of which I talked about several months ago. Then you move into the long tail of edge cases, and wow, that tail can be long. Like what happens if the system reads your last name and decides there is nothing in that field, because your last name happens to be….wait for it…Null. That’s what happened to poor Corbin Wesley Null. His father tells the story on Facebook and it made me smile, so I thought I’d share it with you this morning.
I spent yesterday afternoon with public servants who are helping fix things like Corbin’s FAFSA application, the way organ donations get to their donors, and how the federal government hires talent. Their jobs have never been easy. This morning, I saw one of them on the bus on her way to work, where she’ll keep doing what she does.
That’s just one of the things I’m thinking about today, but it’s one I wanted to share with you.
Clearly whoever built the earlier version hasn't been reading XKCD for the past decade. Or using typed data correctly. How hard is it to distinguish between a string with content "Null", and the special-purpose entity NULL?
"And I hope you've learned to sanitize your database inputs."
(Of course, I can see how once a problem with that has snuck in, changing anything may have ripple effects in every part of the system that uses that chunk of data. So it will become very hard to transition to managing the data the way you should have from the beginning. So kudos to the team that untangled the spaghetti.)
Thank you, Jen. For this ultimately uplifting story and for all you do and share. As the news was coming in last night, thinking of all of the public servant heroes you write about was helpful. I'm focusing on their stories. I'm focusing on my own community work. Thank you