The Power of Positive Attitude? I’d Like to Think So
I don't know… maybe positive thinking really does work. This week I had a run-in with someone that was amazingly uninterested in being flexible. The next day, they changed the API on their system. I was starting to believe that this was just going to be status quo when dealing with them, but then today, I received an email and it amazed me.
Their leader totally reversed his position, and was asking me how I wanted the data. This was a real shock as I had never expected it, and was settling myself in for a series of constant changes to the API and fixes to the ETL to keep things working. Very nice to see.
I spent about 5 min thinking about it, and decided that what we originally had was a good plan, and we just needed to keep going. The original plan was to have an array of maps (this is all JSON) where each map represented a possible match and the array was a logical OR. This allows them to change the nature of the individual maps and the logical OR can include a region and a zip code… or a series of zip codes… or regions… all this was vey well thought-out for the geo-tagging.
I wanted that back, and then asked that for the taxonomy of the demand, we do something very similar - an array of maps where each is a tuple of the classification of the demand based on the default taxonomy. This will also be logically OR-ed to get the possible classifications that this demand can fulfill.
In short, I think it's clean and clear, and makes a lot of sense. I hope they accept it.
In any case, I'm shocked that I might have had an effect on the change of heart, but who knows? Maybe I'll step it up with the people on the train at night and see if they get a little nicer!