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Comment by bencollier49 | Hacker News Reader

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bencollier49·

May I ask what the projects were?

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Car reservation system for auto dealers (never got traction)

Covid screening application (sold)

Inventory management (initial clients in alcohol beverage bottling/distribution)

Do you have any recommended readings/resources to help with data modelling? Especially regarding reservation/scheduling and inventory management?

The reservation app was super simple so no real guidance there I'd recommend really getting familiar with the Django ORM so that you understand how it generates the schema and how to tweak it to get what you want.

As far as inventory management - I looked at several opensource projects and tried to understand their schema and use cases. Not just Django ones but other languages like PHP - PartKeepr for example.

Inventory management is surprisingly complicated to do in a generic way.

The most difficult part of inventory management is convincing employees that telling the system that 40000 units moved when only 38732 units moved is a problem

Thanks for the pointers! Yeah generalizing inventory management is very confusing. I tried looking into Oodo but can't get my head around the data modeling. It feels like trying to implement double-entry accounting, but the money can rot/be broken/gone for other reasons.

Congrats on making a return on your investment! may I ask how you went about locating a buyer for the screener app?

Asked one of the local investors and got steered to another company that was in the same business altho much bigger. Really just plain luck and I guess having a decent network.

May I ask how you discovered those two profitable niches? Did you already have contacts working there that just told you about it or did you go about hunting it down somehow?

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