When an application relies on data from third parties, one of the biggest risks you take when developing these applications is the data you are relying on will change. The biggest worry is that it will change without any notification. Depending on the success and usage of your application, you usually only find out only once things break catastrophically.
An inbox full of "HELP!" themed e-mail from your users is usually how it starts. The next few hours are usually spent fixing the data connections and remapping values.
However sometimes things go
really wrong. Maybe the data models change drastically; or even worse, the data owner decides to implement access control. Usually what you do at this point as a developer is to replace your normal application output with some sort of message to your users explaining the problem.
"Sorry, but we are down for maintenance", or "XYZ just changed their data. Working to fix the problem!" are usually good ones. And then sometimes you use messages like this:
I feel your pain brotha. Well not the donkey-punch pain, but I hear ya.
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Created 215 weeks, 2 days ago