I've noticed that there are a lot of areas in my discipline where I am an encyclopedia of things to be careful of, pitfalls to watch out for, bad design patterns, and the like. I don't always feel like I can contribute meaningfully in how to do something well, but I often have lots of bruises and scars from learning how not to do it. My concern is that only ever being the person to try to warn of potential hazards makes me look negative or toxic, but I also don't want people to lose their time and sanity failing in ways I have failed first. What say you, single digit followers? Am I worrying unnecessarily?

Was working on porting a build job to our Jenkins instance and was seeing something weird on the "display" for the job. Instead of what I expected to see, let's say MapName, I would see:

null
MapName

Well turns out that in the Groovy script it was concatenating via += on a string variable that was null, like someVar += "\n<br/>MapName", which is totally valid in this environment and treats the null value as the string null for the concatenation. I can't imagine a situation where I'd want that to be the default behavior, but I guess that's life..