July 29, 2018: Watching Over the Migration

Sunday.  Today was relatively slow, although we had kicked off our Rocket.Chat migration yesterday so today was a lot of watching as stragglers started to pop in and try to test it early.  So while it was not hectic, there was a regular flow of people looking for assistance with the new platform and asking questions, or just testing things out.  So the whole weekend remained pretty busy.  But the migration seems to have gone really well and this is giving us all a nice, easy feeling about the process.

I did some backup work and while waiting on tasks to finish made myself come coffee and relaxed watching some Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  I’m on the third season, now.

Dominica had a craving for Norwegian brown cheese and so she and Paul went out shopping for a while, going to three different cheese stores, trying to find it.

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.

July 27, 2018: Migration Prep

Friday, but it doesn’t really feel like one.  Lots of work today, much of it documentation and communications, as we prepare for a long weekend of doing a Slack to Rocket.Chat migration for nearly eight hundred users, which is quite a project.  I’m excited to be getting people on to Rocket, though, as I’ve been using it internally for a long time now and it is really a great platform.

Lunch today was bean burritos delivered (by Dominica) from Taco Bell.

Tonight for dinner was a new fish stew that Dominica tried out.  Paul was not much of a fan.  I liked it, but feel that it needs to be a chowder, too watery in this first attempt.

Dominica is working on catching up with me in Netflix’ Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

July 26, 2018: Sales Day

Thursday.  Today was so busy, I managed to eat “breakfast” at one in the afternoon!

Today was really busy with sales stuff.  Lots of emails and calls about projects.  Including one about supporting an early 1990s IBM RS/6000!  Not much that we are going to be able to do for those guys.  We sent them to eBay for parts.