You can't cURL a Border

First, the author is actually wrong. The date is not 5 years before you submit, but is 5 years before the form is received by the home office! So there are a few days of uncertainty, depending on how fast Royal Mail was with the physical documents.

Additionally, I did a request for my information from the home office prior to filling in my form. After all, you have the right to request the information they have on you that will be used to verify your form. Kafka would be proud.

Let me tell you, Home Office doesn't have a clue where you were 5 years ago. It had approximately 50% of my trips, and frequently only had only one leg of the journey. Plane, ferry, train, sailboat, ... it didn't matter. It seems like they have not been keeping the information very well.

The point is not to produce a system where a software engineer can loophole the system. The point is to try to prevent people who aren't committed to the UK apply for citizenship.

It's not even hard really, I did it lastyear. I book a visit to the city hall, they look into the address db and see when I registered the first time. I see exactlt the same thing myself when I login into the thing.

The official agrees with me on the appointment date to actually submit the application, that is after cutoff date.

I put a signature on one sheet of paper, pay a thousand and go my way. The thing takes 15 min tops.

But it's continental Europe, not UK

Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables."

I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.

This is actually standard for other countries too

My guess is that if you need to have been there for 5y, you need to have a way to tell when that 5y starts. I presume it only matters if you apply the day after 5y. When I applied I had been in the UK for over 10y, provided 10y worth of proof of address, and the issue never came up.

It depends on where you're going and what you're doing.

A lot of this faff isn't relevant if you're not applying for any visas or citizenship. Which is most people, most of the time.

The obvious solution to most of these problems for most people is "don't cut it close to any of the limits". If you enjoy traveling a lot, that's definitely a problem, but most people don't cross borders often enough to run into this many corner cases.

This is only a small peek into the awful bureaucracy that will hit Europe if extreme right wing parties keep gaining popularity across the EU. The extra calculations Brexit imposes, but not for every country you travel through!

Do you think applying on February 29 is allowed?

Note also that this isn't a travel requirement.

Overstaying a visa is a big deal. You should not be counting days or nights because you should not let yourself be in the country anywhere near the expiry of a visa.

It's absolutely not best effort that counts.

I've heard many stories of people overstaying their visa in the US by e.g. one day, by way of a mishap or honest mistake, and subsequentially being denied visas or turned away at border control. The effects of this can go on for years and years... it's basically zero tolerance

The Life in the UK test certainly needs updating.

I tend to find that for things like this that are really math heavy, it's usually better to create a DSL (or create easily readable function calls, etc) that you can easily write yourself instead of relying on AI to understand math heavy rules. Bonus points, if the rules are in an easily editable format, you can change them easily when they need to. It seems that was the path the author took...

And yes this kind of use-case is exactly where unit tests shine...

When I’ve worked on complex scheduling problems like that I use copious unit tests, they’re perfect for this kind of input->algo->output problem where algo has tons of edge cases.

Indeed, not using unit tests and instead trying to manually test all the cases sounds crazy to me!

Regarding the writing, I'm the opposite.. but I can't point out why I don't like it.

Maybe because the author is trying to sound sleek and sexy, "look at me, jetset international traveller", although the topic is so nerdy and dull, and the bragging feels off-putting to me.

(My opinion. Did I need to share it? probably not. Flag away if you think so)

I’d say that’s pretty good behavior. It used to be common that images would expand in ways that would not allow you to zoom in mobile devices but also not allow you to open the image directly

At the rate things are going, even EU and Schengen, areas in which their citizens are blissfully unaware how nice they have it compared to outsiders, are going to come to an end. Far-right nationalists are on the rise over Europe.