If you are someone looking to find a developer / contractor / consulting firm that can write that mission critical or critical line of business application for your company that will put you on the map, you need to consider something before contracting the developers.

Just like you get a $9 bottle of red wine that tastes like watery sweetened red cool drink, compared to a $30 bottle of Black Widow or Dirty Laundry that tastes like mature, fruity red wine, you cannot just contract any developer and expect great results. Developers come in different flavours. Usually - but not always - the good ones cost much more, but there is normally great benefit in getting an experienced, mature developer as opposed to a cheap knock off. Now do understand - I am not saying a developer's rate is necessarily a reflection on their skills, as some developers are really good, just have not yet made a name for themselves so they price themselves competitively.

Consider a piece of code in your LOB application that needs to validate a Canadian postal code, which usually consists of two groups of three alphanumeric letters, optionally spaced by a single space character. So the pattern is:

Most people that think they know something will tell you, at least 35 passes of various bit patterns are required to be written to each sector on a hard drive to securely erase all content. If you only wipe it once, it is possible using a MFM (Magnetic Force Microscopy) to recover data, and that it is even possible to see a history of data as each layer of data can be recognised by its age.

This is complete nonsense. A single pass writing all zero's or all 1's are sufficient to completely wipe an old or modern magnetic hard drive so much that the statistical probability to recover any meaningful data is about zero. There is a moderate probability that one bit of information can be recovered, but this dwindles quickly to very near zero as more data is attempted to be recovered.

Since recovering one bit will not help anyone, for all practical purposes, wiping a drive with one pass of writing 0's or 1's will clear out all data and nobody will ever be able to recover it.

Drab winter...

Colourful spring