Tired of Waiting for People – Finishing Teradata Pull

Building Great Code

After waiting for a few other folks in another group, I just decided that there was no reason to wait any longer. A co-worker in Palo Alto has been waiting on some data for weeks now, and there's no reason for it. I had the ruby code to pull data from Teradata and put it into JSON structures for use in the main code base. I had some time today, and just decided that there wasn't a good reason to wait any longer.

I got the code out of storage and refreshed the SQL query with my co-worker and then started summarizing the data as per his requests. Thankfully, it was all pretty straightforward - I needed to collect all deals for a merchant, and take the median of a few values and count up the occurrences of a few others. Nothing horrible, and a few helper methods made pretty quick work of it.

After I got it all generated, it was time to work the data into the Merchant model in the existing code. The final destination for this data is to update the sales value calculation by updating the Merchant's quality score based on previous deals. I needed to put it in the ETL for the raw merchant data and just merge in the new data with the existing data and then it's ready to be used in the calculator.

Not bad. And it didn't take more than an hour or two. No need to wait for the other group any longer. Now they can write their code and then we can make a simple REST client to it and fold in the data in the same way. Easy to update and simple to retrofit. Nice.