Gavin Mendel-Gleason, TerminusDB co-founder and CTO, talks about our vision for how to build collaborative software. The video is a recording of our weekly All Hands meeting.
Building collaborative software considerations
In the video, Gavin talks about applications where collaboration is paramount to both data accuracy and application functionality.
Gavin explains Git’s collaboration model and why Git became synonymous with software. Namely, users being able to choose the workflow and collaboration methods right for them.
The next chapter focuses on approval pipelines, particularly important when thinking about changes made to data by users. Change reviews can be automated, but a human review is often needed to sense check changes.
Gavin explains common data collaboration problems by taking a simple example of an inventory system with two users and a single server. The problems impact the viability of collaborative software. For example, two users update data at the same time and a decision is needed to decide the correct entry. Squashing an entry can lead to data inaccuracies. The wider business feels this impact, which can lead to, poor business intelligence, out of stocks, failed customer orders, or incorrect information being relayed to customers.
The final chapter explains our vision for how to build collaborative software. Embedding approval pipelines into applications so that the aforementioned issues do not arise and data remains true.
Add collaboration to your software
We have turned some of TerminusDB’s features into stand-alone modules that can connect to other databases such as MongoDB. The JSON diff and patch tool is an example of this. Use it to embed UI-driven approval pipelines into your applications.
All Hands Meetings
Every Friday we host an All Hands meeting. One of the team presents each week on a topic of their choosing, be it professional or personal.
As an open-source company, we aim to share our methods as well as our code. Hopefully, you can get a better idea of who we are, what we do, and what our plans are.
If you want to come and talk with us, join us on Discord.