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

I think it's funny!
I'm still a huge fan of the small project getting bigger approach vs the
large project eventually massively laying off employees approach. So I
hope that wasn't the case with the 70k project you were a part of.

Can you emphasize what you mean about not listening well enough with
respect to this thread?

Shane

Marc Grober wrote:
> 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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Received on Tue Mar 17 13:31:36 2009