Size of the array
I was playing with Charlie’s penguin one day when I faced a problem; A problem that I have faced every since I learnt computer programming (especially data structures).
To introduce you to Charlie, it is yet another AI project by a Silicon valley company and hopes to help you manage your finances. It automatically labels your expenses (once you link your Credit Card account with it) and helps you track how much you are spending on something. You could ask Charlie for stats like “How much did I spend on Uber last week?”.
I travel a lot. I am on a plane almost every weekend. I wanted to ask Charlie how much I spent on Southwest Airlines this year. I was eagerly waiting for Charlie’s text (You can use their web interface/messenger bot/ or Text interface to interact with the penguin) with the numbers. What Charlie responded with took me by surprise. “0”. That couldn’t be correct. I had flown the day before.
When I investigated, I figured that all my Southwest transactions showed as “Southwes” likely because of that one problem that all computer programmers would know: The size of the array used to store the transaction details was too small.
Unfortunately for me, Chase Bank (my credit card) provider can no longer fix this problem unless they update all of their records. I’ll probably have to rely on Charlie to do some guessing(it obviously can — think of how Google tells you when you misspell something : “Did you mean ….”) to provide me with the correct results.
A note to computer programmers: Next time you design your data structures, think of the repercussions it may have ;)
