When we found out MySQL utf8 isn't actually utf8..... it's a proprietary subset of utf8 that only includes up to Unicode 255..... and there is a separate "utf8mtb4" that is actual utf8.

Fuck mysql charset shit. Pretty easy to forgot setting charset in server side config file. And after creating several databases/tables, boom! All in latin1. That's just so convenient. are you kidding me? Why would any modern database have their default charset to be latin1??? rather than utf8? Oh, just forgot again, that's utf8fuckingmb4 on mysql land.

Yesterday, after six months of work, a small side project ran to completion, a search engine written in django.

It's a thing of beauty, which took many trials, including discovering utf8 in mysql isn't the full utf8 spec, dealing with files that have wrong date metadata, or even none at all, a new it backup policy that stores backups along side real data.

Nevertheless, it is a pretty complete product. Beaming with pride I began to get myself a drink, and collapsed onto the floor, this caused me to accidentally hibernate my computer, which interrupted the network connection, which in turn caused an OSError exception in one of my threads, which caused a critical part of code not to run, which left a thread suspended, doing nothing.

From the floor I looked at my error and realised my hubris and meditated on my assumptions that in theory nothing should interrupt a specific block of code, but in reality something might, like someone falling over...

Screw MySQL/MariaDB. Who the fuck thought not to document that utf8 is only 3 bytes and not unicode capable. You have to use utf8mb4 for it to work. Fuck those idiots that don't want to admit they made a mistake and put this info in a footnote on a pricy documentation piece.