

Clever ideas that failed - clawrencewenham
http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/clever-ideas-that-failed

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steverb
Wow. This is brilliant. Especially the sins committed, as I am also guilty of
a number of them.

This has inspired me to begin looking back at my projects and compiling a
similar list of things that I have learned by doing it wrong.

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lamby
A refreshing change to the general level of hubris today. Thanks.

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jkkramer
If you haven't already, check out this guy's growing treasure trove of
writing:

<http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/>

Many of his articles have been posted on HN and elsewhere already.

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caffeine
A gem from that site:

    
    
      <Shipments>
        <LineItem LineNumber="1" SKU="123456">
            <Order Number="555444">
                <Package ShipMethod="UPS" Tracking="1Z123467WW53631"/>
            </Order>
        </LineItem>
        <LineItem LineNumber="2" SKU="654321">
            <Order Number="555444">
                <Package ShipMethod="UPS" Tracking="1Z123467WW53631"/>
            </Order>
        </LineItem>
      </Shipments>
    
      The designer of this schema was on crack.
    

[http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/an-open-letter-
to-...](http://sites.google.com/site/yacoset/Home/an-open-letter-to-all-those-
about-to-commit-edi)

~~~
clistctrl
That entire article is a treasure chest, almost strikes me as he wrote it
during a therapy session.

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raphar
Hey what a coincidence! I dunno why he failed with the 4th one.

We maintain a leasing administration system here, and one of the most
important/critical features is doing the thing he describes. You can know the
exact state of any leasing contract (or a group, or all of them) by chosing a
date of the future and past. That way you can compare the expected result vs
reality. It is implemented fully inside a SQL DBMS (and works fine)....

~~~
akeefer
Yeah, that bit made me cringe a bit too, since you have to do the something
similar for storing insurance policies (track when things become effective,
including forward-dated changes, storing past versions, etc.). No predictions
necessary in our case. I'm guessing dealing with the time dimension is a
general property of any system that needs to store anything that qualifies as
a legal contract.

It is true, however, that adding in that time dimension makes everything a
much, much harder problem.

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obecalp
Good lessons, except for 1, without doing that there'd be no Google map-reduce
and Hadoop. Of course, this means you should be using Hadoop now.

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nick-dap
I got to the end of the entry and felt inclined to click "Report abuse" at the
bottom of the page. =D

Loved it. Looking back, I have sinned as well.

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wlievens
Great article. It's a pity that over-engineering is often the path to failure,
because over-engineering is so terrifically fun to do!

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socratees
@clarencewenham, you should have a nice blog and move your content there.
Doesn't matter whether you update it frequently or not.

~~~
clawrencewenham
I dislike the blog format, I've tried it several times and it doesn't work for
me. I found that I prefer the Wiki style where you focus on a TOC. Hopefully
Google will figure out how to implement RSS for GSites one day.

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stcredzero
Makes me think of that quote from Spinal Tap. You know, that there's a fine
line...

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alain94040
Is there a way to access this without having to login to google docs?

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sb
an interesting article in similar vain: niklaus wirth's "good ideas, through
the looking glass".

~~~
DougBTX
[http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig....](http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~wirth/Articles/GoodIdeas_origFig.pdf)

