Re:Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
by blowski on Monday June 03, 2024 @03:17AM
(#40560140)
Go down the simple path to start, and refactor to a more complex solution when it makes sense to do so. If experience tells you the client is definitely going to ask for it later, add a “break condition” that tells you when you need to upgrade. You can put entry points into the code - comments, interfaces - to make it easier to do the upgrade.
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Re:Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
by stef25 on Monday June 03, 2024 @06:37AM
(#40561280)
Normalise the DB from the get go (doesn't really require much effort), then charge for the fact that "actually we have a customer who has 2 email addresses".
Re:Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
by izacus on Monday June 03, 2024 @08:37AM
(#40562082)
In many many cases this doesn't work and it crashes and burns the whole project/startup company when its necessary.
Sometimes messing up your fundamental architecture means that you hit a refactoring your company won't survive (while your competition grabs all the customers who wanted that feature your architecture doesn't allow).
This is where experienced lead engineers earn their worth - they understand which parts cannot be fudged and fixed later and need to be there from the get go.