Back in college at The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, I was on the list of tutors for math for my company, Regimental Band and Pipes. What I found often times was that someone was struggling with a subject because they didn’t have a strong grasp of the foundations. For instance, one particular freshman (“knob” in our parlance) was struggling with Calculus I. As I started asking questions around how one would solve the problem, it became apparent that the root problem was that he hadn’t learned several foundational principles from Algebra. Thus, we shifted gears and I had him focus on learning that which he didn’t get in high school. A few weeks later, we returned to Calculus. After a couple of weeks, he was able to bring his score up and pass the class. Had we not returned to the foundations, likely he would have continued to struggle the grasp the material and likely would have failed (we were beyond the drop/add deadline).
In Kevin Kline and Jeff Garbus’ talk at the PASS Summit, Database Architecture Antipatterns and Fails, a lot of the antipatterns revolved around foundational concepts. Just a few weeks earlier I was asking by an architect how a particular third-party application could still be vulnerable to SQL injection attacks in 2024. His comment was, “This is foundational stuff.” He’s absolutely correct. And often times when we see problems, we can tie it back to things that are foundational. I am not surprised when I am troubleshooting something and find that the root cause is something I would consider “foundational stuff.”
Buck Woody wrote some time ago that he regularly takes the time to go back and review the basics of the technologies he knows and understands well. Buck has been an expert in our industry for a long time. If he places value in reviewing the basics, that’s a lesson for the rest of us. It tells us to take the time to master the foundational basics of whatever technology we’re working with. If we have mastered the basics in the past, it behooves to periodically review them. The industry changes and what was considered a best practice or requirement may have changed. For instance, I was discussing the distance between data centers for disaster recovery purposes. The recommendation on how far apart those data centers should be has changed over the years. So even if we think we are solid on the basics, some of them may have changed on us. Only by reviewing will we catch that.