There's a despair that overcame me when the data we were processing changed date/time format in the middle of a file. It was a file for one day's data! Data on

There's a despair that overcame me when the data we were processing changed date/time format in the middle of a file. It was a file for one day's data! Data on 5 minute intervals for 3 thousand data sources. Received in an email, no less. (Long story). But date/time format changed. The initial load was garbage. As many know, some countries use mm/dd/yy and others dd/mm/yy. I just wanted to cry when I dug in and saw the change. Instead, I hacked a little more on our lowly ETL script to check for this circumstance. This was just one example of an ongoing stream of data weirdness, as ETLers everywhere know. In an early startup, (< 4 engineers in my case) I can't imagine using anything but a skanky script at the outset. We went broke before we needing a framework. Needed more engineering time on other things.