Database

One thing that I love to do is visit National Parks. Visiting them all is on my bucketlist. Some people really like to collect the cancellation stamps; I am more concerned with witnessing and experienceing all these amazing natural areas. At the time of writing this, there are 63 parks, and I have been to about 18 of them. I say “about” because I am not 100% sure that I went to certain ones since I went when I was a kid (Grand Teton, Haleakala). So I will be going back to make sure that I hit those. But I digress. There are a couple different ways I could track which parks I have gone to. But, perhaps inevitably due to my occupation as a software developer, I have considered storing that information in a database. I thought about putting that info in a SQLite database so I could easily drop it in to various projects if I’m trying a new technology and need some quick data. Sure, I could use a mock data generator like Mockaroo, but it’s fun to have real data sometimes, and also to be reminded of my goal. ...

I was doing a bit of job searching recently, and I applied to a company throgh a referral from a friend who worked there, so it was a little more high stakes than just a run-of-the-mill interview, as I wanted to leave a good impression at the very minimum. This was a full stack position, and I made it to the technical assessment. There was a database component, a backend component (python), and a front end component (Vue.js). It was a take home assessment and I had 72 hours from the time I started it to finish. I started with the database component, then did the python portion, then finished up with the Vue.js stuff. I spread the work out over the first two days, then took the third day to optimize anything, double check my work, and make sure I didn’t do anything wrong. All my tests passed. I was feeling good about every part of it. I submitted it, and began waiting to hear back. ...

Several years ago, I took over partial data ownership a web application at work. The front end was a mishmash of Javascript and PHP, and the backend was C#. There were some areas for improvement there, but it was workable. However, the most glaring problem was the database. The entire application was backed by as single node Amazon Redshift database. I am here to spread the word: DON’T USE AMAZON REDSHIFT… …as the only database for your entire modern web application. Just because your application is going to be so big that “big data!!1!” (spoiler…the data was not big) does not mean that a columnar database is going to serve the needs of a web application. Let me give a few reasons why. ...