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Comment by bhldev

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Comment by bhldev

I value experience a lot, over almost anything.

What you mention is very dangerous to the data. Take the medical app example. Suppose there's an app to update a chart that doctors carry around. Suppose there's five doctors and/or nurses working on the patient. Whose prescription or orders do you take? On top of that it gets worse -- there might be dependencies between the orders, orders might be to countermand other orders or in response to others which may or may not exist. It is not a problem that any algorithm or programming can solve, because the whole point is to take the experience and skill of the doctors which is being blindly ignored for some process that the doctors may or may not be aware of who submit the information. Similar problems could appear for any of the examples you mentioned if you dug hard enough.

As for the submission you can simply ban submission unless you have an active Internet connection. 737 Max is also "real world experience" Boeing panicked at Airbus and instead of going through a 10 year design and 10 billion dollar process for a plane they surrendered to market realities at the cost of lives. The fact that "enterprise" has onerous business requirements or even legal requirements demanding technical sacrifice doesn't make it any less technically wrong. If asked to make a sync on the client side I would make it as simple and straightforward as possible and assume nothing.

I suppose so long as it doesn't cost lives or ruins people I don't particularly care if you value handling data on the client in this way as a qualification for "enterprise" mobile developer. As long as it's "good enough" to meet the requirement, great. But it doesn't mean I like it, and it doesn't mean one should ignore technical flaws. Unless it's ACID you don't guarantee anything it's just a feel good (and possibly done in a much simpler way). For all the scenarios you mentioned I can mention another half dozen scenarios or even a very simple one, one person with same seniority making exactly the same change to the same record. Then your system tosses one or the other or even merges them -- in other words you dive into expert systems, NOT anything to do with "syncing".

Experience is important but there's a theoretical foundation to everything and it's wrong to expect an offline node in a distributed network to act as a source of truth for any period of time. Sorry.

Replies bhldev · 2019-10-21
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