00027 - Seeking Council from Experts

Today we sought council from an expert.  A man who has taken a not insubstantial amount of time researching properties of plants that grow on the peninsula where we live.  The walk-through our property was enlightening and I think that going forward from today, I'll be sharing some of the plants we found on our property and what they can be used for.  So far 16 varieties of plants and we're only half through what's available.

He has this large set of books that break down to the compounds the contents of various plants.  Chemical compounds.  They have an index by compound and an index by plant.  It's a vast selection of data all meticulously recorded and arranged.

But the large amount of data and ponderous way you have to navigate to get useful information out of the books depending on what your intent was, got me thinking about data storage and useful indexes.  A large amount of data is useless without a portal into that data that displays it in a usefully accessible way.

It's probably a given for those who have worked with largely different types of data in many contexts, but I've spent most of my time as a developer living in the land of the relational database.  Postgres is my jam.  It probably behooves us to think about how a large set of data will be used before deciding how to store the data, and how best to access and present that data.

The end user is royalty.  And then you can build for flexibility based around how likely it is to require a different perspective on that data going forward, or how much flexibility costs in the first place.

Hmm.

Peace,

Shane