You're Doing It Wrong
Posted by Evan at 10:21 pm on September 27th, 2009
I think one of the great joys of learning is realizing how bad you are at doing something. Truly, "The more you learn the less you know." This happened to me recently, several times actually, and each time it was one of those "A-ha!" moments where I finally saw the error I had originally made; though now as I work on fixing my mistakes I can't help but wonder how far off the mark I still am. :)
Making mistakes isn't bad: it's an important part of the learning process, just like losing a game is a great way to help you become a better player the next time around. What is important is being able to identify the errors and then develop a way to fix them or even avoid them in the future.
One of the places I've noticed this recently was in the database design for unguku.com I had created back in the Summer of 2008. Knowing next-to-nothing about how to properly design a database, I had simply thrown some ideas together and then hacked the code to make it work. Sure, the system has done the job for over a year, but it isn't pretty.
What really brought this to light for me is the Database Management course I'm currently taking. While we've only been meeting for five weeks, I've learned enough that when I look at the database I designed that Summer I cringe. Thankfully, now that I can see the issues, I can work on fixing them.
For this particular project the fix will come in the form of PurpleCMS v0.4, which will feature (for the first time) the merging of the blog and CMS sides of unguku.com into a single project and repository. Having both the blog and the CMS work with the same code-base has other benefits as well, but getting a chance to do a full redesign of the database is pretty high on the "reasons to do it" list. I'm not saying I'll get it perfect this time around, but it'll be a lot better and smarter than it was before.
And, after discovering how much I still don't know, I can fix it again later. ;)
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