Databases
A couple of semesters ago I took a paper in information systems design (or something along those lines). The paper was mostly about database structures and involved a lot of diagrams called ERDs or Entity Relationship Diagrams. At the time I didn’t think I was learning anything important. I aced the exam and then forgot about it.
This afternoon while trying to add some more features to my Rails app I managed to completely mangle the database structure. After procrastinating for a couple of hours I grabbed a pencil and paper and drew a diagram of where all the tables should go and how they should be connected.
The end result looked an awful lot like an ERD. Maybe I did learn something after all.
