Rizwan's Blog -Developer's hangout!

Database developers are people too — you make mistakes just like everyone else. The problem is, users are the ones who pay for those mistakes when they have to work with slow, clunky applications. If you’re part of your company’s IT team, a mistake could cost you your job. If you’re a freelance developer, a bad database usually means a lost client — and even more lost business, if word gets around. Here are some common design pitfalls to watch out for. 1: The data’s unimportant; it’s the architecture that matters It doesn’t matter if your code sings, if you don’t know the data. You want the two to work in harmony and that means spending some time with the people who use and manipulate all that data. This is probably the most important rule: Before you do anything, you absolutely must get intimate with the data. Without that firsthand knowledge, you might make errors in judgment that have far-reaching consequences — like dragging the whole application to a complete halt. A nonchal...

How many developers think they're good programmers? We're not. We're all fairly bad at what we do. We can't remember all the methods our code needs to call, so we use autocompleting IDEs to remind us. And the languages we've spent years, in some cases decades, learning? We can't even type the syntax properly, so we have compilers that check and correct it for us. Don't even get me started on the correctness of the logic in the code... I'm looking at a chart that shows failure rates for software projects. "Small" projects (about a year for 8 people) have a 46% success rate. That's almost half. Any longer project just plummets down to a 2% rate for projects costing 10 million or more. In other words, our projects nearly always fail. We constantly write code that breaks existing features. We add features in ways that won't scale. We create features nobody wants. In short, as an industry, we all stink. You can fight this. You can su...