Sometimes it happens that people speak different languages. Even when speaking the same language. People have their own professional inclinings. Biologist may see the world as the way a cell work, cosmologist may see relationships between people as attraction between planets. And as with languages different professional afflictions give you an useful way of seeing the world. And I think everyone would find some CS concepts useful. I’ll try to list some of these concepts that I’ve found many people don’t find “native”.
- Primary keys – the fact that every “entity” should have a unique identifier, so that you can refer to it unambiguously. Whether it’s a UUID or an auto-increment, or a number/string derived from a special set of rules, doesn’t matter. And you may say it’s obviously, but it isn’t – I’ve seen tons of spreadsheets and registers where entities don’t have a unique identifier. Unique identifiers are useful for retrieval – if I have a driving license number, when I fill an insurance form, should I fill all the details from the driving license (name, address, age), or just a single number, and the insurer should then get the rest from a driving license database?
- Foreign keys (+ integrity violations and cascades) – the idea for this post came to me after I had a discussion with a bank clerk who insisted that the fact that my bank account is being deleted doesn’t mean that my virtual PoS terminal will also be deleted. To her they seemed unlinked, although the terminal is linked (via a foreign key) to the bank account. One should be able to quickly imagine links between data points and how dependent data can either block the removal or the parent, or be deleted with it.
- “Fingerprint” (hash) – the fact that every entity can be transformed into a short, unique identity representation. This has some niche applications outside of the technical realm, but one should be familiar with the concept of transforming a large set of data points to a single representation for the sake of comparison.
- Derived data – the fact that you don’t have to store data that can be derived from a primary dataset with well defined transformations. E.g. sums. I had to explain this over and over again when I was talking about open data – and ultimately, sums were there anyway. The key here is that derived data is less important than the algorithm used to derive it.
- Single point of failure – this becomes obvious the second you spell it, but people tend to ignore it when designing real-world processes. How many times you’ve been stuck in a queue and you thought “this is obviously a single point of failure, why didn’t anyone think of preventing these delays”. It’s not always simple (even in software, not to mention the real world), of course, but the concept should be acknowledged.
- Protocols and interfaces – i.e. the definition of how two systems communicate without knowing each others’ internal functioning. “Protocol” in the non-technical world means “the way things are usually done”. An interface is usually thought of as a GUI. But the concept of the definition of how two systems communicate seems kind of alien. Where “systems” might be “organizations”, a customer and a sales rep, two departments, etc. The definition of the point of their interaction I think helps to conceptualize these relations better.
- Version control – the fact that content is a continuous stream of changes ontop of an original entity. Each entity is the product of its original “version” + all the changes applied on it. This doesn’t just hold for text, it holds for everything out there. And if we imagine it so, it helps us… “debug” things, even humans I guess.
The list is by no means exhaustive. I’d welcome any additions to it.
And now I know non-technical readers will say “But I understand and know these things”. I know you do. But I imply that they are not an intrinsic part of your day-to-day problem solving apparatus. I may be wrong, but my observations hint at that direction.
| Reference: | Computer Science Concepts That Non-Technical People Should Know from our JCG partner Bozhidar Bozhanov at the Bozho’s tech blog blog. |
