One thing I slightly regret in the data modelling that is done for users in Wazoku is that I bowed to marketing pressure and “conventional wisdom” and created a pair of first and last name fields. If gender is a text field then how much more so is the unique indicator of identity that is a name?

The primary driver for the split was so that email communications could start “Hey Joe” rather than “Hey Joe Porridge Oats McGyvarri-Billy-Spaulding”. Interestingly as it turns out this is definitely the minority usage case and 95% of the time we actually put our fields back together to form a single string because we are displaying the name to someone other than the user. It would have been much easier to have a single name field and then extract the first “word” from the string for the rare case that we want to try and informally greet the user.

My more general lesson is that wherever I (or we more generally as a business) have tried to pre-empt the structure of a data entity we have generally gotten it wrong, however so far we have not had to turn a free text field into a stricter structure.