Codepen Radio

There was a small problem in our database. Some JSON data we kept in a column would sometimes have a string instead of an integer. Like {"tabSize": "5"} instead of {"tabSize": 5} of the like. Investigation on how that happened was just silly stuff like not calling parseInt on a value as it came off a <select> element in the DOM. This problem never surfaced because our Rails app just papered over it. But we're moving our code to Go in when you parse JSON in Go, the struct type that you parse it out into needs to match those types perfectly, or else it panics. We had found that our Go code was working around this in all sorts of ways that felt sloppy and inconsistent. One way to fix this? Fix any bad data going into the DB, then write a script to fix all the data in the DB. This is exactly the approach I took at first, and it would have absolutely fixed this problem. But Alex took a step back and looked at the problem a bit wider, and we ended up building some tools that helped us solve this proble