Software Design

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.

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!

Should you delete records from your database or instead use a soft delete? I was recently asked my view on this question by a follower on Twitter. So what’s my answer? Well, I’m not usually thinking about “deleting” anything. Instead, I’m thinking about adding. YouTube Check out my YouTube channel, where I post all kinds of content accompanying my posts, including this video showing everything in this post. Hard Delete So we’re all on the same page, let me take a step back and discuss deleting data in general. Hard deletes refer to removing the data from the database. For example, with… Read More »Should you Soft Delete?