As a software programmer, one of the things you learn early on is, “Correlation does not imply causation.”

Just because you added something, or made a change somewhere, and something else occurs, it is dangerous to immediately conclude that the changes you made is the cause. Oftentimes things just occur at the same time, without necessarily being related.

On a project I work on for a client, we deployed a small change that added a popup calendar to some date fields in the HTML. That was pretty much the extent of the changes we made. Soon after the deploy, the client discovered a date-conversion bug in the application, and made the implication that the popup calendar we added was the cause of the bug. When in fact, they had nothing to do with each other. It just happens they discovered the bug, which had been there in the code for a long time, at the same time we deployed this update.

And what does the title of this blog have to do with what I’ve written so far? Nothing. I just was going to mention that I’ve just noticed now that when I’ve moved here to Minneapolis, I’ve been having a lot more dreams, far more visual dreams, than I ever had when I was in DC.

Correlation does not imply causation.