💻 Tech
In one of Go Time’s podcast episodes, one of the unpopular opinions is to not rely on NULL values to know if the value is supplied or not. For example, some people don’t have middle names, and we commonly see NULL to represent that. Others, use empty strings. However, the guest’s opinion is to use something like boolean that clearly indicates the value isn’t supplied. This makes the intention clear and explicit, avoiding potential bugs and confusion. If the application/presentation layer shows a tick box for the middle name, the data layer then needs a flag or indicator to represent that.