"You do not need to write any code to figure out the most difficult part of most software products"
Completely true and something that I wish more people understood and practiced! Most engineers (even seniors) want to immediately start cutting code. I think the saying is "Weeks of coding can save you hours of planning".
Re:Data-Oriented Architecture (2020)
by monkeybutton on Sunday November 14, 2021 @01:48PM
(#29219464)
>You can iterate this problem space with Microsoft Excel.
I believe this! If you can format your data in excel in such a way that people can easily answer their questions with pivot tables and vlookups, you're most of the way there to a good schema. And it's a much lower cost to produce some test workbooks in excel for people than building and populating full databases using new/prototype services.
Success with these efforts is unlikely in larger teams. You need to put the most wizened chef in your data modeling kitchen and have them serve the business stakeholders until they are leaving 5/5 reviews on yelp. Design of schemas by committee is how you wind up with N of them and up to N^2 bullshit protocol/mapping/service layers for communicating between them.
You can iterate this problem space with Microsoft Excel. You do not need to write any code to figure out the most difficult part of most software products.