Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

I went down the deep dive of “falsehoods programmers believe about names” [1] and on my most recent project, made the name field a completely open ended text field; let the users type what they want.

It ended up being a quick mistake, especially marketing a product intended only for western audiences anyway. Any integration you do with third party software expects first and last names. So do email templates and form fields. So do actual users when they upload or download cvs files.

Same story, I’m sure, with addresses. There are benefits with the flexibility of a long open-ended text field, but with that flexibility, a ton of other things will be a pain in the ass.

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...