[aklug] Re: Any web/database people out there?

On the other side of the coin, I was had my ass chewed for
solving a users' requirements with a 15 minute free solution
which my IT Department had turned into a $70K 24 month
out-sourced contract......
We often don't listen very well, and are inarticulate to
boot. We enable stupidity, cupidity and a wealth of idities
to broad to catalog here. And we take ourselves so
seriously..... The following was posed to me in a recent
interview:

  Q: A user calls you and tells you that she can't print.
     How do you respond?
  MG: Suggest she try cursive....

Apparently I don't have a future in stand-up.....

Shane R. Spencer wrote:
> Heya folks,
> The lack of initial description leaves a lot to the designer to make
> suggestions about once he knows more about the scenario.. I suggested a
> simple platform that can handle most web ui/database scenarios. It
> works for a great deal of projects.
>
> Josh is right on the money with what he wrote. However it seems like,
> at least through my own experience, that 90% of the time the web client
> has some idea of what they want and no time to actually implement it or
> think about scaling, load, and how content delivery will be done..
> leaving a lot of that up to the developer in the first place.
>
> I'd love to have a client that knew how to answer the below questions
> adequately :)
>
> Much Love,
> Shane
>
> Josh Rhoades wrote:
>> Jim,
>>
>> I assume your brother means he's looking for help with database
>> design, followed by a web application front-end to manage it. I'll
>> also guess that anyone looking seriously to take on this kind of work
>> will be needing more information than just the number of rows in a
>> database.
>>
>> I'll offer the following questions I'd get answered before approaching
>> anyone about building something. Otherwise, you'll probably spend a
>> lot of time finding out what some of the important questions are.
>>
>> 1) Who is going to use the database/application? How will they use it?
>> These kinds of questions are usually vastly more important than which
>> database you choose, or what you use to build the application. These
>> are usually collected as a huge set of "use cases," that are then
>> established into requirement specifications for an application. I
>> would collect a few of these, written as "stories," depicting how a
>> user will interact, the results expected, etc.
>>
>> 2) Is the data sensitive, such that it needs to be protected? Backed
>> up? Available for a certain percentage of the day? It's easy to skip
>> these kinds of concerns at the beginning, but devastating when they're
>> ignored.
>>
>> 3) Database folk like to deal with entities and relationships,
>> particularly in the design phase of projects. For example, a Person
>> may have a name, a phone number, a street address, but that Person may
>> also have none, one, or more Pets, each that have their own names,
>> ages, etc. Simple statements like this define the shape of the
>> database, same as how the use cases above define the shape of the
>> application. It's the database person's job to gleen these kind of
>> relationships from what gets answered in 1), but it's always helpful
>> to have an idea of what's critically important for an application in
>> the beginning rather than having to do costly redesign later on.
>>
>> I can't really say "I know a guy, girl, company, etc." which would
>> probably be more helpful than what I've got written so far. For
>> whoever you do find, don't let them convince you that paying huge
>> amounts of money for software like Oracle or some fancy Java web
>> server is a good idea. Open source web app development, particularly
>> in recent years, has been rapid and vast, and there are many freely
>> available and powerful tools any business can use.
>>
>> On a personal note, a database isn't big until it's at least a million
>> rows. Or you're doing something with it so unholy that even a thousand
>> rows brings it to its knees. Erm, not that I've built something like
>> that before...
>>
>> Regards,
>> Josh
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Jim <jwadell@gci.net> wrote:
>>> got the following from my brother:
>>>
>>> Any idea who could do a big database for me? =A0Tens of thousands of
>>> records. =A0Web enabled. =A0Probably Oracle...
>>>
>>> Probably mysql, but who is to quibble. Anyone do web databases? not sure
>>> of the parameters, but this might be a chance to do a smallish web projec=
>> t!
>>> Jim
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>
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Received on Tue Mar 17 11:59:08 2009