I've been writing code for about as long as him, but because I started with Asm, which makes one become really careful with buffer sizes, doing something like making one thing larger would not be done without carefully looking "down the line" to see if any further changes were required; and they almost certainly were. That's not to say I haven't corrupted files before, but fortunately nothing quite as catastrophic as wiping the disk.
I've been writing code for about as long as him, but because I started with Asm, which makes one become really careful with buffer sizes, doing something like making one thing larger would not be done without carefully looking "down the line" to see if any further changes were required; and they almost certainly were. That's not to say I haven't corrupted files before, but fortunately nothing quite as catastrophic as wiping the disk.