As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working with the VaccinateCA project to try to bring the pandemic to an end a little earlier by helping g

Simon Willison’s Weblog

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-27 17:30:08

As I mentioned back in February, I’ve been working with the VaccinateCA project to try to bring the pandemic to an end a little earlier by helping gather as accurate a model as possible of where the Covid vaccine is available in California and how people can get it.

The key activity at VaccinateCA is calling places to check on their availability and eligibility criteria. Up until last night this was powered by a heavily customized Airtable instance, accompanied by a custom JavaScript app for the callers that communicated with the Airtable API via some Netlify functions.

Here’s one that took me fifteen years to learn: “let’s build a new thing and replace this” is hideously dangerous: 90% of the time you won’t fully replace the old thing, and now you have two problems!

Replacing an existing system with a from-scratch rewrite is risky. Replacing a system that is built on something as flexible as Airtable that is evolving on a daily basis is positively terrifying!