Sean's ongoing career as a consultant keeps supplying him with amazing code.

Let's talk about encapsulation. We put getters and setters around our objects internalsto help keep our code modular. Given an object, we call something like getUsername to extract a piece of that object safely.

In the same codebase as IsTableEmpty, Sean found this short-but-sweet gem:

public String getUsername(String username)
{
    return username;
}

This version of getUsername requires you to already have the username. Oddly, it behaves unpredictably, as if you pass it a postal code, it returns the postal code, and doesn't complain that it isn't a username.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/you-can-only-get-what-you-have