A busy few weeks. A visit from an old friend, a server migration (which isn’t yet complete), and life.<\/p>\n
Migrating a bunch of mailman lists to google groups has gone fairly smoothly. The MailMan Archive Migration tools\u00a0<\/a>turned out to be very useful — the reposted messages appear with the time they were reposted and the order seems to be a bit mysterious, but everything’s there to the satisfaction of all\u00a0the interested\u00a0parties. A more frustrating limitation when migrating lists is that users can be added ten at a time to a maximum of 100 per day. Hopefully I only need two days worth.<\/p>\n The rest of the server migration falls under the headings of domains and databases. Nothing particularly exotic, mostly tedious.<\/p>\n The last two weeks in code…<\/p>\n Opportunistic extraction — wrote a little bit of perl \u00a0to make the most of some readily available well-structured data and provide easily readable update information in a particular script. The results are pretty good — and it will probably break as a side effect of some other change at an indeterminate time in the future.<\/p>\n Related thought: dependency tracking. How can we better track reverse dependencies? Not only are unknown consumers of code & data a common source of bugs, that changing some code might break something else becomes a cause for code stagnation. We can do better.<\/p>\n Breaking everyone’s everything — migrating a lot of code to a new shiny settings management system. Worth the effort, but a lot of time spent diagnosing complex interactions between build configurations, target macros, and my own mistakes while working with a third-party’s shiny new code. Related: adding diagnostics. Also related: removing silly old hacks. Both of these can be quite satisfying.<\/p>\n Fixing my own breakage — turns out that bugs added in an unrelated branch can languish a long time before they get noticed. Better testing habits seem desirable. Also, being a less terrible programmer.<\/p>\n Technical debt — hacks put in place to get an app reliably demoable may not be suitable for use outside the demo. I demoed a thing — it \u00a0went well (really<\/em> well). But then I needed days to clean up the frenzy of code hacks, and even then I ended up with bugs that would bite a week later. Probably a\u00a0lesson there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A busy few weeks. A visit from an old friend, a server migration (which isn’t yet complete), and life. Migrating a bunch of mailman lists to google groups has gone fairly smoothly. The MailMan Archive Migration tools\u00a0turned out to be very useful — the reposted messages appear with the time they were reposted and the … Continue reading “Random notes 2014-11-18”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[65],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1349,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348\/revisions\/1349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brnz.org\/hbr\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}