Closer To The Ideal

Kevin Dewalt suggests that programmers with experience in large corportions are bad for startups, because the emphasis in corporations is on doing things the right way, whereas the emphasis in startups has to be on cutting corners so that you can hip quickly:

So how did I design the database for my most recent startup? Having been in situations where poorly managed database relationships resulted in months of rework, I used foreign keys. That was my experience, and I’m guessing the experience of the developers who made the comments above.

Unfortunately I found that foreign keys in my Rails migrations were a constant source of headaches. Moreover, I decided to migrate to Heroku during the project and had to re-write the foreign keys for Postgres instead of MySQL. What did I learn about customers in this process? Nothing.

In retrospect, I believe I followed bad practice for lean startups building working prototypes. Database integrity is an important issue when you have achieved some measure of success.

May I be so blessed to have these type of problems in my next startup.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 4:21 pm and is filed under programming, project management, risk management, startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.