One of the things you learn when starting any new subject is how very little you know and nothing highlights this more than when you’re surrounded by experts in the field.

But if you want to fly, you need to hang out with eagles, not chickens.

I rubbed shoulders with coders from major corporations, and big names in the app world, some of whom are basically celebrities in the nerd-world - people who create software and hardware and everything in between - and chatted to as many people as I could (not easy for an introvert!)

I was able to have a few one-on-one sessions with Apple experts too - firstly a design session which told me what I needed to know. That my UI was awful and stale.

The second session was far more helpful. I’d shown a Data engineer what I’d done & how my database was sluggish. Then he simply asked, “Why don’t you just use Core Data?”

I embarrassingly had no idea what he was talking about… but in short, Core Data is Apple’s way of implementing & interfacing with a relational database. He took the time to show me how it works and some web sites to help learn more.

This was the critical piece needed to make Somnus work - a proper relational database where objects are distinct, where renaming one updates it everywhere instantly, and where they can be linked to other objects.

So Cases are objects, as are Comorbidities. A Case can have multiple Comorbidities, and a Comorbidity can be linked to multiple Cases. This is what’s known as a many-to-many relationship.

There are other relationship types in Somnus too, like one-to-many (ie. Specialties -> Operations) as an example. A Specialty can have many Operations but an Operation can only have one Specialty.

At the end of the conference, after a concert with Panic at the Disco headlining, we all went home to our corners of the world…