Caveman Database Modeling...FTW

 When you are learning you burn a lot of time going in circles and doing things thebhard way. That is what learning is. You do a thing, you think it is good, or at least workable, and then some time later you catch an error or see a gap in logic or implementation and you go back and make changes. It's not lost time... it is the reality of learning. Do, break, fix, check, do, break, fix, check, rinse and repeat. 

I started out thinking the tdf db needed to be a large number of tables and all kinds of relationships because I wanted to avoid excessive data duplication. I feel that was the right concept, but my skills arent there yet. So the cost for the lack of skill is an increase in time spent. In time skill will increase and time spent will decrease, at the same level of complexity. Once the complexity increases, skill will decrease and time will increase again, for a period of time. The cycle continues. 

In an old TESTED video Adam Savage used a formula to describe this better than I can. Q = E+S+T

Q= Quality

E=Experience

S = Skill

T = Time

If one is low the others must rise. Experience helps with learning new skills. This includes having knowledge of multiple processes and knowing how you approach situations/tasks. The skill variable is about the alignment of a specific skill with a specific process. There is carry over between skills, but rarely, if ever are they a 1 to 1 motch. This mismatch is where experience comes into play as well. To wrap the three up if skill and experience are low then time will naturally have to increase if quality is to remain constant.

I am a visual person. I have heard it refered to as being an object visualizer. I comprehend better when i can, at minimum, see the thing, and being able to put hands on it is even better. Factoring that piece of information in, i am building a model of the database in google sheets. Caveman database model for the win.

Riders (soon),

stage_stats,

stage_results,

a summary sheet (with an eye toward being able to use it as the basis for visualiztions down the road)

and quasi manually entering the data myself (copy/paste/clean purgatory). On the list is learning how to webscrape and transform the data, but it is not above the fold just yet. That skill is at a level of complexity I am not at yet. Mileage not make up. I'll get there.