February Chicago PUG – what the conversation was about

It’a almost time for our March PUG, and I never blogged about the February one, I guess now it’s as good as any other, especially because  the March PUG is just several days away, and as usual I hope to attract more people to our next event

As for the February PUG,  I really liked it, even though I managed to completely mess up and accidentally cancelled the meetup! I am still not used to the new Meetup editor. Nevertheless, perhaps it was even better, that I’ve made people to re-confirm their participation at the last minute.

I was presenting our most recent work –  a new framework for efficient communications between a database and a web application. My favorite topic; and I was super -excited to share our success. And I was very glad, that one of our application developers decided to stay for the PUG, because very soon all the questions merged into one big question: what did you do to make it happen? What did it take to change the developers mindset? How did we pull it all together?

And my coworker started to describe, how we did it. And I’ve realized, that I almost forgot about many obstacles, which we had overcome. How many things didn’t work from the very beginning. How many “extra miles” we had to walk in both directions.

Answering the comments on one of my previous posts on that topic: it’s just not so easy to write a “matrix” of decisions which would automatically replace the ORM. Most of the time it’s a customized development. If an app developer would always know that method A involves three joins on a database side, and method B pulls the attributes from the same table as  method C… then probably they won’t start using ORM from the very beginning. But the purpose of ORM is to hide these details!

It’s not easy to do things differently, Especially in a small startup. With all the deadlines, and with clear understanding that there is a potential slowdown in development. But we all tried to do the right thing – as a team. I give a credit to myself for coming up with a framework which at the end of the day is easy and convenient to use in the application. And I give even a bigger credit to the whole team for willingness to work through all the issues toward the best solution.

My fellow chicagoans! If by now you feel sorry you missed the February PUG – please consider coming to the March PUG upcoming Wednesday!  Johnathan Katz from Crunchy Data  will be presenting the talk “An Introduction to Using PostgreSQL with Docker & Kubernetes”. We expect another “bridging the gap” event 🙂