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"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be ob
by _gabe_ 4y ago
"Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious." -- Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man Month (1975)
It's unfortunate that most people these days prefer unstructured blobs of json to formal relational databases. It's impossible to get up to speed in these types of environments because every time you think you "understand" the data, you find out about a random property that gets set in rare occurrences that throws off the whole relational model you intuitively built in your mind.
- wankle 4y agoPeople who excel at theory usually don't do well in most programming positions. Perfectly normalized schemas do not hold up well in an operations heavy environment.
- _gabe_ 4y agoI'm not advocating for perfectly normalized schemas. There's a large gap from: perfectly normalized schema -> unstructured blob of json. I'm saying that most people nowadays prefer to not think at all about how their data looks and they'll add properties ad-hoc. This also does not hold up well in an operations heavy environment. Like all things in programming, a well balanced approach is necessary. Some combination of formally structured data with some flexibility for future requirements is probably the best course of action here, but that's too much work for programmers these days.