Chapter 19
Moving the spreadsheet into Minyu
Gary meets Sam behind the counter again.
The spreadsheet is open, familiar.
But this time, Gary isn’t listing problems.
He’s waiting.
“So where do we start?”
Sam doesn’t rush.
“We start small,” he says.
“With the two things everything else already depends on.”
Gary thinks for a second.
“Albums,” he says.
“And artists.”
Sam nods.
“Exactly.”
Nothing else yet.
No customers.
No sales.
No rules.
Just the core.
Two tables — nothing more
Sam sets the rule of the day.
“Don’t worry about the fields yet.”
Gary looks at the form, half-expecting a lecture.
Sam shakes his head.
“We’ll go deeper later.
Right now we’re only deciding what exists.”
So they create two tables.
One for albums.
One for artists.
Nothing else.
Just enough structure
Sam clicks through the setup quickly.
Names.
A short description.
A few checkboxes.
“This isn’t about getting it perfect,” he says.
“It’s about giving the system something real to hold on to.”
Gary notices how different this feels.
In the spreadsheet, structure grew by accident.
Here, structure only appears when they say it should.
An intentional pause
They stop there.
No rules.
No validations.
No automation.
Sam closes the dialog.
“We’ll come back to the details,” he says.
“Once the shape is right.”
Gary looks at the screen.
Albums.
Artists.
That’s it.
For the first time, the system feels calm —
because nothing extra has been added yet.
Columns as commitments
They recreate only the columns Gary already had.
Title.
Format.
Year.
Nothing speculative.
Sam is explicit about it.
“A column isn’t a convenience,” he says.
“It’s a commitment.”
If they’re not sure they need something,
they don’t add it.
Gary feels oddly relieved by that.
Connecting records to artists — once
Then Sam connects the two tables.
Not by name.
Not by text.
By relation.
“This,” Sam says, “is the part Excel can’t remember for you.”
Gary immediately understands.
No more spelling variations.
No more guessing which artist belongs where.
The connection exists once —
and is reused everywhere.
Everything else stays out
Sam is careful to say what they don’t do.
They don’t add rules.
They don’t add validation.
They don’t add permissions.
They don’t even import data yet.
“This step is only about giving your structure a place to live,” Sam says.
Gary nods.
Nothing has changed yet.
And that’s the point.
The spreadsheet becomes what it always was
Sam leans back.
“What you had in Excel wasn’t wrong,” he says.
“It was just carrying too much responsibility.”
Gary looks at the screen again.
For the first time, the spreadsheet doesn’t feel like the system.
It feels like a draft.
A good one.
But still a draft.
Continue reading
In the next chapter, Gary worries he’ll have to re-enter everything.
Sam calms him down.
They won’t redo the work.
They’ll move it.
Carefully.
Deliberately.
Without changing meaning.