I landed a massive database upgrade on a payroll system years ago, end-to-end standardization, cleanup, and improvement with a seamless rollout.
replyOur back clapping was interrupted by an angry customer phone call. One of our customers had gotten access to our internal schema and had a massive reporting setup in Access solving most of his needs.
I ended up converting his reports using some internal tools we had. Customers will grab anything to give them.
[The caliber and depth of his reports were such I wish we would have bought them instead of making me spend months building out our own reports.]
> [The caliber and depth of his reports were such I wish we would have bought them instead of making me spend months building out our own reports.]
replyLearning from customers is some of the best learning you can do. :)
I had one customer that managed to figure out which stored procs were tied to which reports we were using. Then he would deliberately break it in weird subtle ways them and call tech support 'just to see how we would react'.
replyThe API surface is what’s exposed, not just what’s documented.
replyThis is probably an even more important principle in the age of LLMs.