July 28, 2018: New Siding & Slack to Rocket.Chat Migration

It is a Saturday and a super busy one it is for me.  First, the morning kicked off with Jim coming over and starting work on getting the siding replaced on the house.  While Dominica and I had been gone there was a bit storm and a large amount of the high siding on the house was ripped off.  Paul and Jim had managed to get it covered temporarily back when it happened, but we have been without all of our siding now for about a month.  So today, Jim is up there residing the house.

Today is my big Slack to Rocket.Chat migration project that has been pending for about two months.  I got the migration itself kicked off around ten this morning.  Just loading the data into the database is a several hour process.  We have seventy six thousand messages that the one database has to output, which is pretty fast, and another has to translate and ingest, which is not fast at all.

The migration is a mammoth, all day project.  Once the migration proper was done and the new system was up and running and all of the data was there, and everything was confirmed to be working, then came the even harder work of learning the Rocket.Chat APIs, writing scripts to automate the processing of password change requests, and getting new password resets sent out to all of the nearly eight hundred users on the system!  Quite a project.

So that migration project basically consumed by entire Saturday, which had been the plan all along.  This was a big project, but in the long run is going to make our lives easier.  In theory, at least.  I am happy that we got this done, finally, and that it went relatively smoothly.  A handful of people got into the system and started trying it out today, too.  Tomorrow will be more of a test as lots of people likely will pop in to see what is going on.  Monday is going to be nuts.