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Discussion on: What are some of the biggest software mistakes and tradeoffs you’ve encountered? Answer to be featured on our podcast 🎧

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Craig Nicol (he/him)

I worked on a networked application many years ago that we'd inherited from a well known IT consultancy. It involved getting case information to case workers so they could process applications and discharges.

Every action on the case sent the entire case file to the server, and back again.

And every request had the case in binary format and in the raw active record encoded in XML, so for each of the 300 staff, they were transferring 0.5Gb of data on every key press (and a lot more for searching).

The IT admin was constantly fighting network issues until we got a chance to rewrite it.