

My last name is correct and your DB validation is stupid - tarahmarie
http://thecowgirlcoder.com/2013/05/15/my-last-name-is-correct-and-your-db-validation-is-stupid/

======
a-priori
Names are complicated, very personal, and vary a lot depending on the culture.
In English-speaking North America we're actually spoiled that most people have
names that follow a standard given-middle-family convention. And also that
one's given name is the same in all contexts.

But not everyone's name follows the same format. My wife has two middle names,
one of my friends has three middle names, his wife has two given names and a
middle name, and my father-in-law goes by his middle name.

And this convention is not true everywhere. Wikipedia has a list of articles
for how names work in various cultures:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Naming_convention>

As an example, here's how it works in Russia (note the diminutive form, where
the given name depends on the social status of the person they're addressing):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_personal_name>

Of course, in lots of parts of the world, especially east Asia (e.g. China,
Korea) it's common to put the family name first.

In general, the answer to "What is your name?" is "Who's asking and why?". If
you need a person's name, you should ask for it in one of three ways:

1) What is your full, legal name? (e.g. Jonathan Anthony Smith Jr.)

2) What should we normally call you? (e.g. Jon, Mr. Smith, Johnny, Tony,
Junior)

3) What name should we use when billing your credit card? (e.g. Jonathan A.
Smith)

You should only ask the ones you need (don't need a full name? don't ask), and
they should all of these should be free form with generous length limits and
accept any Unicode text.

------
sp332
This is an important topic, but the article is needlessly sexist. It pretty
much assumes that men don't have hyphens or spaces in their names, even though
her husband does. Women might have (a lot) more trouble with this than men,
but jumping to the conclusion that there must not be any women on the Comicon
website team is unwarranted. Also she explicitly calls "single capitalized
word" names "heteronormative" which doesn't make any sense at all.

~~~
tarahmarie
So you read the first sixteen or so words, I'm guessing.

~~~
sp332
Well I read down to the heteronormative bit. But this part: _I am going to go
to the About Us page, and I am going to see that the database engineer’s name
is Ms. Destinnee Chang-O’Driscoll. Then, I am going to paste a giant grin on
my face, take a selfie, email it to that woman, and thank her for kicking ass
at SQL._ I'm not saying that won't happen, but it seems that you think only a
woman with a similar problem will make a website that works. Maybe you meant
something different.

~~~
tarahmarie
"This isn’t just a female problem; people with apostrophes and commas in their
names all have this problem." I understand that I focused on my problem. It's
my blog, after all. However, I did marry a guy with a space and two capital
letters in his name. My friend has a ", Jr." to contend with. Try that on for
size. Two different punctuation marks, a space, and a capitalized letter.
There's a reason I said this isn't just a female issue.

~~~
dubfan
But you waited until the 7th paragraph to mention that. By that point you had
already framed the argument as being a female issue. Not only that but you
dismiss it by saying "this isn’t something that often happens to men." It's
not something that often happens to women either. Most people in English
speaking countries do not have hyphens or spaces in their names.

Your point is totally valid and important but it would have been much more
effective if you framed it in a gender-neutral way.

~~~
sp332
"More effective"? It's a post on a personal blog, not a manifesto.

------
aed
Relevant patio11: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-
programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-
believe-about-names/)

I'd love to seem some kind of standardization around this. Perhaps the
"persons" table doesn't have the name but rather the name is stored on a
"names" table with an EAV model allowing for all kinds of conventions.

~~~
astrodust
I'd love to see some of the supporting arguments for some of those not because
I doubt them, but because I'm curious.

Know Thy Edge Cases, and all.

~~~
SatvikBeri
In parts of India it's common not to assign a child's first name when they're
born. My birth certificate says "baby Beri". "Satvik" didn't come about until
I was ~6 months old, and I have relatives who had no official first name until
they were 12-14 years old!

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AncientPC
Cache version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fthecowgirlcoder.com%2F2013%2F05%2F15%2Fmy-
last-name-is-correct-and-your-db-validation-is-stupid%2F)

~~~
tarahmarie
I really appreciate you doing this. The lovely gentleman at Rackspace just
broke the crap out of my site when he UNPLUGGED the server my VM was living
on. I'm doing a site restore right now.

~~~
degenerate
I tried rackspace years ago and had this happen. There was no apology,
compensation, or admittance of guilt. It totally irked me and I stayed away
from rackspace since then. I'm actually glad to hear they still do this
today... my "unjust" fears are justified :)

------
mseebach
You make quite a point out of this being a problem for women. But presumably
your husband (whose last name I assume is Van Vlack?) has the exact same
problem?

------
onemorepassword
Sidenote: afaik, "Van Vlack" is not a "Dutch" name.

Inappropriately adding the "Van" (which in Dutch is written with a lowercase
v) is typically something Americans of Dutch origin did to make their name
sound more interesting to Americans.

But for those looking to process Dutch names (or other cultures with similar
construct), those names are sorted by the part behind the "van", i.e., "Jan
van den Brink" (yes, it gets more complicated) will expect to find his name
under "B".

~~~
dalke
What you are saying is correct, but mostly in a pedantic sense. In the US
context, "Dutch" name would mean "of Dutch origin", and not necessarily "as
used by a Dutch person." (Many people consider themselves "Irish", despite
being 3 or more generations removed from the Emerald Isle.)

The New York City neighborhood of "Harlem," for example, is a Dutch name even
though in Dutch it's spelled Haarlem, and the original name for the place was
Nieuw Haarlem. It's more precise to say that it's the English spelling of a
Dutch name, but most people find that level of precision needlessly detailed.

I have no problems asserting that "Van Vlack" is an American spelling of a
Dutch name.

------
manacit
As someone with a Dutch "Van *" last name, I run into this issue all the time
as well. Unlike the author, it doesn't upset me, I don't really care.

Sure, I was a little worried when the guy at the DMV warned me that the
California system would always register my name wrong -- adding 'Van' as part
of my last name along with my middle name. He told me to just mention it and
everything would be fine.

Sure, it was pretty annoying the next time I went into the DMV and the guy
blew me off, saying the system was fine. Sure enough, a few weeks later, my
license arrived in the mail, incorrect. Unfortunately, they won't change it
unless I bring them a passport or a birth certificate and pay to get it fixed,
but it's not the end of the world. That change has persisted, and now my
Washington State license still has my wrong name. Oh well.

Because my last name is much longer then the author's - 27 characters
including spaces - it's been truncated since Kindergarden, and my University
ID is still misprinted. Oh well.

I guess my point is that it's not the end of the world, there are bigger fish
to fry.

~~~
computerbob
I also have a Dutch "Van" in my last name and have given up trying to use the
" " (space) in my last name. It just isn't worth the hassle of trying to use
it. But I totally agree with you in saying "It's not the end of the world".

~~~
Casseres
I recently changed my last name, now it has a space (Casseres Palmer). I just
say something along the lines of, "My last name has a space, not a dash." I
haven't really found it difficult to use. Out of all my licenses and IDs, only
one of them has a dash in it. I don't know if it's because of the database
limitation, or the person who entered it in assumed it has or needed a dash.
My university, work, and other companies that I deal with have no problem
accepting a last name with a dash.

------
post_break
Stating you bought your twitter handle is a quick way to get your account
deleted.

~~~
joshstrange
Came here to say the same thing, I had to re-read that like 5 times before I
realized "Yes, Yes, she did just admit to breaking Twitters TOS...."

~~~
dubfan
Fortunately for her, there doesn't seem to be any way to report that.

~~~
post_break
Well that's not true: <https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-
violations>

------
kimagure
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthecowgirlcoder.com%2F2013%2F05%2F15%2Fmy-
last-name-is-correct-and-your-db-validation-is-
stupid%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthecowgirlcoder.com%2F2013%2F05%2F15%2Fmy-
last-name-is-correct-and-your-db-validation-is-stupid%2F)

Sorry if my URL has extra stupid bits, I don't do this often

------
tarahmarie
Sorry about the site being down; give me a minute to bring it back up.

~~~
twrkit
Not to pile on, but there is a certain irony in the error message being
returned:

 _Error establishing a database connection_

~~~
biot
"If there had been even one single man handling the database, the thought
would have been raised that perchance, just possibly, a caching layer should
have been used."

That statement sounds just as wrong as stating that if only a woman had been
on the tech team or handling the database, that the Comicon registration
system would have accepted all last names. Women are capable of deploying
caching strategies just as men are capable of recognizing nonsensical name
validation.

------
mirkules
I also wish we had a way to include "special"[1] characters in names. My name
would have a "ć", so I could never spell it correctly and had to anglicize it.
I guess including spaces is a good start, but it would be nice to have the
ability to add other characters too. Or, allow some kind of alternative
spelling where every character is allowed so that people could actually still
type my name using an American keyboard or a Czech one or whatever.

[1] As a developer, I got into the habit of calling non-English letters as
"special characters" until someone pointed out that these characters are only
"special" to people who don't use them.

~~~
mseebach
There's a good case to be made that in many cases you must be willing to adapt
your name to local circumstances. In many cases, the reason for having your
name written down is for someone else to be able to read and understand your
name.

------
oblio
This is a good article about this problem:
<http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names>

------
tanglisha
I have a rather long name, and always get irritated about tiny signature
boxes.

~~~
tarahmarie
How about when you end up with a truncated last name? At this point I have to
maintain a list with comments on what my last name actually ended up being in
the system for each website. Especially when I have to enter my name in for
password retrieval.

~~~
tanglisha
I at one point had a name that was extremely long. Because it was in two
pieces rather than four, it was usually misspelled rather than truncated.

------
jwarren
This is a very tangible problem, and a very solvable one when the right
considerations are applied. Good on you for bringing it up. Personal
expression, especially at a level as simple as a name, shouldn't be limited by
bad software design. Sadly, many designers (possibly including myself!) have
native-English bias, and don't cater wholeheartedly to names and characters
which are unusual in the US and UK.

Unusually, I do feel the need to disagree with the inference that this is
evidence of a gender bias in the tech industry. While our industry clearly has
a massive gender bias (towards men, obv) and I feel strongly that it's
something that needs to be highlighted frequently, I don't think that false
positives are beneficial. I think this is a gender-neutral problem, and I
think the gender talk is confusing and distracting to the very real problem of
Western-centric design and development.

------
smackfu
I think we can all agree that not allowing spaces or dashes in a name field is
poor, poor programming.

------
evanb
Physicist Gerard 't Hooft has a whole page about the apostrophe-t in his name

<http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ap.html>

and provides a lengthy list of manglings and mishandlings.

------
jack-r-abbit
I've never heard of someone taking both their given last name and their
married last name together as their new last name but without a hyphen. This
is a new one for me. Hyphenating is very common. But so is replacing your
given middle name with your given last name and taking on your married last
name. If I saw "Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack" written somewhere I would have just
figured you did that. So technically you full name is "Tarah Marie Wheeler Van
Vlack". Interesting.

Edit: I also have a female friend who I'd always known as Maggie Smith-
Brown[1] and I always just assumed that she started as Maggie Smith and
married Mr. Brown. Until I met her husband... Mr. Smith-Brown.

[1]not real name

~~~
chimeracoder
> I've never heard of someone taking both their given last name and their
> married last name together as their new last name but without a hyphen.

That's actually incredibly common in Spanish-speaking parts of the world.

It used to be that women would add "de Foo", where Foo is the last name of
their husband, but nowadays it's fashionable to drop the "de", because that
implies ownership ("de" is the Spanish equivalent of "'s")

It actually gets way, way more complicated, but that's a tl;dr:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs>

~~~
Casseres
From what I understand, the hyphen was introduced to last name of Spanish
origin because spaces were not allowed in databases.

------
oddshocks
Ironically, "Error establishing a database connection"

------
davidjhamp
My last name is correct and your DB is down

------
learc83
What is the solution to this? Names don't always follow first middle last.
What about people who have 7 names? What about people who only have 1? Data
needs some kind of structure to be useful.

I'm about to start a new project, I'm thinking of two fields "Legal Name" and
"What should we call you?", both with special characters allowed.

But then you can't search by last name, and I think a lot of our users would
be confused if names were in order lexicographically by first name.

~~~
fishtoaster
There are a lot of properties of names that go against the basic "John Smith"
format. How many of those properties you want to support probably depends on
how much of the population you need to service.

For a bootstrap proof-of-concept project, I might expect names to be a pair of
strings with no spaces in them. This'd cover (at a guess), 95-98% of US users.

For a startup, I might expect two strings, one of which can be blank, each of
which contains 0-50 unicode characters. This at least adequately support (at a
guess) 99-99.99%

For a government organization, maybe a single string, 1k unicode characters,
and a way to snail-mail in a different name if yours doesn't fit that
definition? That might be a bit extreme for a local government, but something
like the IRS, where you have no choice but to use their service, has to push
the limits of permissiveness.

------
greenyoda
Given how infinitely variable names are, I'm not surprised that programmers
have trouble getting them right. But I've also seen problems with validating
something as simple as an e-mail address. For example, I wanted to get e-mail
updates for a shipment on Fedex.com and discovered that I couldn't enter an
address that contained more than one dot after the "@": name@example.com was
OK, but name@subdomain.example.com wasn't accepted.

------
sdfjkl
_> Administrative Contact: Wheeler Van Vlack, Tarah_

I think I know what you mean even with the site being down.

------
tnuc
The persons name is: Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack

Shouldn't the name be: Tarah Wheeler van Vlack ?

~~~
molf
Depends. Prefixes of Dutch names are lower case if preceded by another name,
and upper case if on their own ("Van Vlack" versus "Wheeler van Vlack").
Prefixes of Flemish (Belgian) names never change case, so the name will either
be always spelt as "Van Vlack" or "van Vlack", regardless of context.

I guess that in the US the Dutch/Flemish conventions do not apply, and the
spelling choices will depend on the person/family.

------
tarahmarie
<http://ow.ly/i/27W6g> <\--- THIS is my issue. I can't even order a
replacement debit card online. I have to go into a bank because Bank Of
America can't handle my name. This happened two minutes ago.

------
zarify
Related: An Aussie journo who goes by one name, and the problems he has with
that.

<http://stilgherrian.com/category/only-one-name/>

------
LordIllidan
Is there any need to ask for First or Last Name? Why aren't we just asking for
Full Name? Why complicate things?

~~~
MartinCron
If you ever want to be able to alphabetize by last name, having them captured
distinctly is necessary. Otherwise, it's impossible to know where one part of
the name ends and another begins.

------
tarahmarie
FINALLY. Got site back up. It's anyone's guess how long it stays there,
though.

