[halfcat]

We’ve done this using Django’s admin portal to let non-technical stakeholders work with database records, and it works well enough. It creates a self-serve scenario for some users, for some kinds of tasks.

The challenge is (as always) finding the right level of abstraction. A premature, wrong abstraction is way worse than making it work by hard coding some logic in the code, or (gasp) just copying and pasting the code a few times, until it’s clear which direction the abstraction is pointing, and at which level it’s operating at.

Like if you start building some generic workflow engine that doesn’t match your actual needs, you’re going to build something that’s clunky to work with, and that it’s hard to backtrack from the design decisions made. It’s better to hard code or duplicate something and remain noncommittal about architecture and design choices until you have clarity.

In practice it’s always a dance. You have to push the boundary to some degree or you’ll never build anything tangible. The usual advice of “just ship something” is not bad here, as shipping a complete failure will be a more information-rich data stream about the right direction than more planning.