At Hackolade, I have been really enjoying my journey into the world of data modeling. It really has been a journey: in some ways, I have felt like I had to go back in time a little bit, and re-learn some of the skills that I had known in the old days when relational databases still dominated this blue planet. ER diagrams, documentation requirements, naming conventions... all good things that had seemed completely normal in the old days - and that got a little bit of a bad rep when the hipster NOSQL databases and data formats started to gain popularity. I mean: at Neo4j, we used to say that "your data is your model", and downplay the need for deep modeling thoughts ahead of time. And at the same time, we also realised that every time a project wasn't going great, it was the freakin' data model that was the culprit. Every time.