Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Attempts to put unstructured information into a structure had their day. Goodbye to them.

Much of the information that people use is unstructured. Consider a novel you like. Consider a text that is the foundation of a field of study. Not much structure that is easy to ingest into a computer.

Until now.

Since 2008, I have kept records of job searches, interviews, and the like. I typed those records in a Google Docs file. If I were to print it, and I am not printing it, it consumes 600 pages. It is unstructured. It is readable by humans only.

Until now.

I drug a copy of the text file into several of these chattering bots. When did I apply to a job with ACME Inc? What job was it? What was the outcome? Bang. Boom. Pow. Out pops the answer. The chattering bots understand the unstructured structure.

For years, I contemplated making a JSON or XML or something file with this information. That would allow me to query the structured information using a Structured Query Language or something. That would be the only way for me to find information.

Until now.

New tools. Some old problems solved. Waiting had its benefits. YAGNI (you aren’t gonna’ need it) came true in this case.

Goodbye JSON, XML, and the like. You worked in your era. Times change.