I've seen scripts with hardcoded "/home/$username" so your worries aren't entirely unfounded.
It's understandable too, because Linux doesn't provide a nice way to retrieve that information. You'll have to parse /etc/passwd (which might not contain all users) or hope that whatever language you're using supports path extrapolations so that you can do realpath(~username) or call a third party tool that does, like a shell.
