In this talk, I'll be documenting the trials and tribulations I've experienced when working with Unicode; from encoding, to normalization, and the not-so-obvious differences between alphabets. I'll take you on the usual Product/Engineering journey where requirements can change, bugs are discovered where you least expect them, and your knowledge of Unicode needs to be as flexible as your Product Manager's priorities. You think 'Gemüse' === 'Gemüse'? You might be wrong!

Attendees will walk away wielding newfound Unicode knowledge like a mighty sword, ready to slay an array of production issues related to characters and bytes. You'll get the most out of this session if you're required to show or produce text to users, but don't quite understand the barriers that exist. I've befriended the Unicode monster, and you can, too!