Modeled the maritime domain — professionals, companies, ships, jobs and reviews — into normalized PostgreSQL schemas with SMALLINT lookups and UUID v7 keys.

Situation. The heart of NextMariner is a dense maritime domain — professionals, companies, ships, jobs, reviews — and these things reference each other constantly. A professional sails on ships, works for companies, leaves reviews; a company owns ships and posts jobs. Nearly every feature is a query across that web, so how well the data is modelled decides how well most of the app performs and how sane it is to extend.

Task. That domain had to be modelled so it stayed fast and kept its integrity, and so that adding the next entity type didn’t mean fighting the schema.

Action. It’s laid out as normalized PostgreSQL schemas organised by domain. The many small, stable enumerations — statuses, types, categories — became SMALLINT lookup tables, which keeps the rows compact and the joins cheap instead of storing text codes everywhere. Entities get UUID v7 primary keys, so they’re globally unique but still time‑ordered in the index. One naming convention runs throughout — plural table names inside singular‑named schemas — applied without exception, which as a bonus sidesteps a lot of reserved‑word collisions. And the relationships are held up by real foreign keys and constraints, so integrity is the database’s job, not something the application has to remember to do.

Result. What came out is a data model that’s consistent and quick, and predictable to work in because the same rules hold everywhere — there aren’t special cases to memorise. Adding a feature usually means extending the schema along the existing grain rather than working against it. It’s the floor the rest of the platform stands on.