Author:: feifan zhou Link:: https://feifan.blog/posts/the-database-inside-your-codebase Tags:#media/article personal data ownership Summary::
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Wouldn’t it be great to be able to browse all these jobs in a table? Maybe you could perform some basic operations on this data: searching for specific jobs by name or owning team; sorting by the time-of-day they’re scheduled to run; filtering for jobs owned by your team that have errored in the past week. Maybe you could edit the run_config from that interface (like you might edit a spreadsheet) and have it automatically make the corresponding change in the source code (or open a PR). Maybe you could even compute some aggregations on this data — for example, if you’re introducing a new job that requires some expensive computation, maybe you’d like to know which hours have the fewest other jobs scheduled. And of course, this job browser should be bidirectional with respect to the codebase — there should be a button beside each entry that shows the code for the job inline or opens the corresponding code in your editor.
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- navigating a code base is so hard because it’s all accidental complexity because there’s no structure for the code. You rely on following imprecise naming techniques in order to make wayfinding easy. You talk about code in higher-level concepts that aren’t present anywhere in the code (pipeline, workflow, etc.)
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Just like SQL databases and spreadsheets provide a singular querying abstraction and a set of visualization primitives that can be applied to any kind of data, programming environments need a singular querying abstraction and set of visualization primitives that can be applied to the concepts lurking in codebases.
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you should still be able to do whatever you want with your code (including treating it as plain-text files), and also have access to more advanced introspection tools that can query and slice your code — tools that let you easily understand and navigate complex codebases to reduce the incidental complexity of building software.