Security, Plumbing, and a Sneeze
I had great fun writing my recent article “Objects, Relationships, and the Cat” in which I shared one of the things I enjoyed most about working on the Salesforce platform using a rather unconventional story-telling style. In fact, I enjoyed it so much, and based on the positive feedback from readers, I thought I’d do it again. As before, this is a work of fiction with the exception of the technical aspects.
I didn’t really notice that the conversation between my housemate and Angie had gotten louder. I was accustomed to their heated technical discussions. After all, spending several months mostly stuck indoors during a pandemic hadn’t exactly put us in a state of mind to be calm or quiet. Still, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all had they not suddenly become very quiet.
Their silence was probably a result of my earth-shattering sneeze. I pulled off my headphones, rubbed my nose, and stared at the cat gazing at me from the bookshelf beside my desk. She didn’t look the slightest bit guilty.
“You didn’t take your allergy medicine this morning, did you?” my housemate asked. I nodded. The pills are the price I pay for us having adopted a cat. I grabbed one and washed it down with some warm lemonade.
“Okay,” I sniffled, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to concentrate for a while. “What are you two arguing about now?”
“My customer has a tough set of requirements with an impossible deadline and budget,” answered my housemate. “And we can’t agree on the best way to approach it. You’ve done enterprise software – care to give it a look?”
“Sure,” I replied. “It can’t be harder than living with the cat.”
“It’s a corporate application,” he started, ignoring my comment. “Nothing special in terms of the database schema – a few related tables with some columns and a straightforward UI—just a few fields. Authentication is easy enough. They use single sign-on through a third party OAuth provider and their corporate users already have accounts. The kind of thing that any web framework can support easily.”
“That doesn’t seem too bad,” I said. “So, what’s the issue? And why did you call in Angie?”
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