MySQL’s “utf8” isn’t UTF-8.

The “utf8” encoding only supports three bytes per character. The real UTF-8 encoding — which everybody uses, including you — needs up to four bytes per character.

MySQL developers never fixed this bug.

In 2015, I gave a talk in which I called Donald Knuth the Patron Saint of Yak Shaves. The reason is that Donald Knuth achieved the most perfect and long-running yak shave: TeX.

I figured this is worth repeating.