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Thank you, ivanhoe! When I read that sentence, I gasped and thought the same thing. I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that wo

by edw519 5y ago

Thank you, ivanhoe! When I read that sentence, I gasped and thought the same thing. I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that would have never been needed if the database had been designed properly. But it wasn't because the deployer didn't think they needed "deep knowledge" that day. We stand on the shoulders of giants who figured out the fundamentals just for us. The worse the violation (different data types in the same column, ugh!), the more application code (10X) will be needed. The more code written, the more more maintenance (another 10X) needed. And none of it ever gets replaced, just migrated to something else years later (if we're still in business). ASIDE: As for the interview question, I would never ask what "ACID" meant. I'm more interested in understanding than recall. I would just give the candidate a poorly designed database and ask what they would do to fix it.

emilsedgh 5y ago
And that's why you have senior engineers and junior ones. If you are trying to hire, expecting every junior dev to know all this stuff means you'll skip a lot of candidates who can contribute a lot to your business. They shouldn't be trusted with writing things from scratch. But if your codebase is mature enough, getting db connections, making endpoints atomic and stuff like that already should have a convention so your junior engineer wouldn't have to do it on their own.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
> I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that would have never been needed if the database had been designed properly. And then there's the time that I rewrote a small database application, but couldn't really reduce the byzantine schema, as that's just how our business works. However, I did reduce the main query from 727 lines to 93, and made it run twice as fast. And then, of course, the project was canceled because of politics, and the group still struggles with their terrible application, 3 years later. I should really write a book about terrible management in Fortune 250's.
deleted 5y ago
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by edw519 5y ago

emilsedgh 5y ago

And that's why you have senior engineers and junior ones. If you are trying to hire, expecting every junior dev to know all this stuff means you'll skip a lot of candidates who can contribute a lot to your business. They shouldn't be trusted with writing things from scratch. But if your codebase is mature enough, getting db connections, making endpoints atomic and stuff like that already should have a convention so your junior engineer wouldn't have to do it on their own.

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

> I've spent a career writing thousands of lines of application code that would have never been needed if the database had been designed properly. And then there's the time that I rewrote a small database application, but couldn't really reduce the byzantine schema, as that's just how our business works. However, I did reduce the main query from 727 lines to 93, and made it run twice as fast. And then, of course, the project was canceled because of politics, and the group still struggles with their terrible application, 3 years later. I should really write a book about terrible management in Fortune 250's.

deleted 5y ago

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