I just finished proving my residency as a Colorado state citizen for some continued education. I needed to do this so that I didn’t have to pay out-of-state tuition fees of over $1000.00. While the staff at the Community College were trying to change my status to resident they went through all sorts of heck with generic error messages that didn’t help and java dialogs asking them if they wanted to try again until either their computer crashed, their computer became outdated, or the miraculous happened and things actually saved as they were supposed to (I am not making up the number 48 when I say they had to try 48 times to get things to save).

What really concerned me though was that the staff had been trained to get things to work by saving the information twice. You see the first save worked, but the second save refreshed the information from the database. Whomever coded the sorry Java/Oracle/Pergatory application was too lazy to write the code correctly and failed to understand the need to refresh tainted data. If people use your software please don’t train them to double save. It just isn’t worth keeping your code around if you work that way.