As a truly open-source platform, we would like our Terminators to know what the product roadmap is and where we currently stand. We use multiple product development frameworks and tools such as Milanote to help ideate and visualise our product decisions strategically. The product roadmap is exactly as it sounds, it is a high-level visual summary that helps to carry out our company’s vision over a period of time, normally 12 months or longer. At TerminusDB we believe product roadmaps are important as it provides a digestible and comprehensible way to communicate key product priorities with internal and external stakeholders. We have divided this into different episodes.
Meet Sarah, a junior developer in the IT department at Industrial Gizmos and Widgets, an international wholesaler supplying gizmos and widgets to an international market. Her department’s boss, Nathan, asked her if she could figure out how to get a list of unwarbled widgets from the widget information system (WIS). WIS was a legacy system written on DB/2 in 1986, the database schema had spiralled out of control, the UI, written in Turbo Pascal. The source code was lost long ago. Details of which widgets were the ones that were warbled, and which were not was hard to figure out.
She saw Cheuk Ting Ho speak at an online event about TerminusDB and how it could be used to aggregate, clean up, query, and export data, so she decided to give it a try. She cloned the QuickStart script on her Ubuntu Laptop, which already had git and docker, ran the server, and logged into the console. Using what she learned from Cheuk’s tutorial, she imported the widget data from a CSV export, and wrote queries to tidy the data and filter out the already warbled widgets. She then exported the data as a new CSV file, opened it in Excel, and saved it as an Excel file. Happy with the result, she emailed the spreadsheet to Nathan.
It was near the end of the day, and she was reading a blog about Prolog on Hackernoon, when Nathan emailed her back. “Sandra, this is Fantastic” wrote Nathan. “Come to my office at 9am tomorrow morning, I want to talk to you about a new project.” Sarah was so happy that Nathan was pleased with her work that she wasn’t even too upset that he seems to think her name is Sandra.