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Derek Comartin

Just store UTC? Not so fast! Handling Time zones is complicated.

Should you store dates & times in your database as UTC? It’s pretty standard advice if you’re working in a system that needs to record dates and times from many different time zones. But this advice doesn’t hold true when dealing with dates and times in the future; here are some things you need to consider. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Just store UTC? Not really. You’ll hear/read pretty standard advice to store all dates/times as UTC when storing dates/times in a database.… Read More »Just store UTC? Not so fast! Handling Time zones is complicated.

STOP Over-Engineering Software!

Can we, as application developers, stop over-engineering software? I hate to use the term engineering even to describe it! I’m guilty of it too. I was writing “clever” code that was overly complex, hard to understand, and hard to change. Here are some of the pitfalls I see and what I think about to guide me down a more straightforward path. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. “What if” Game One of the traps I think developers can get into is playing the “what… Read More »STOP Over-Engineering Software!

Data Partitioning! Don’t let growth SLOW you down!

Why would you want data partitioning? Data keeps growing. Hopefully, you’re working on a system with active customers with a good lifespan! If so, the amount of stored data will keep growing over time. The challenge can be managing data growth, which can start to impact performance. I will discuss ways to use this data and strategies to avoid it affecting performance. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Multi-Tenant In a multi-tenant application, there are multiple ways to silo data. First, you can use… Read More »Data Partitioning! Don’t let growth SLOW you down!