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Discussion on: What part of your first dev job were you least prepared for?

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Nick Cinger

Database encoding!

I started of freelancing, and one of my first regular clients was from Saudi Arabia. His bread and butter was purchasing PHP scripts for Ad scripts and forums and modifying them to work on his market.

The problem was that he needed everything working right-to-left with Arabic script. Making this work in general was a pain, but MySQL encoding issues took it to whole 'nutter level.

First time I did this, it took me 2-3 days to figure it out. But once I figured it out future similar work I was able to do in 2-3 hours. Which is what I love about programming in general - things you learn speed you up by an order of magnitude.