Working with Rails and Phoenix has made me more conscious of a related set of software architecture mistakes I am seeing in other systems…
- How hard can it be to have consistent table names in a relational database? Preferably have plural table names, or if you prefer have singular names, but please do not have a mismatch with some table names plural and others single.
- How hard can it be to have a consistent name for the primary key of a table, something simple like
id? - How hard can it be to have a consistent name for the foreign keys in a table, something like
other_table_id? (Please remember when doing this that the foreign key is to a specific row so theother_tablewill be singular) - How hard can it be to have consistent convention for naming the common CRUD methods to access records in the database?
Over 20 years ago we were talking about Software Patterns and Coding Idioms, but many systems I have looked at in the past 10 years have failed to get some or all of the above items wrong, leading to interesting defects and confused developers.