Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
I had to migrate a site from an in-house CMS backed by an Oracle database to a CMS built on Rails. I tried to get a data dump from the Oracle DBAs, but alas, they couldn't help me. So I curled the site. I then used Hpricot (a precursor to Nokogiri) to parse the HTML and grab the (inner) nodes that I wanted for the new pages.
We knew the client was particular and exacting, so I built the outer elements exactly like the old site. I then wired up our CMS to render the inner nodes. I then curled our CMS to get the pages.
I ran a character by character diff against each page on the two different sites. They were the same. The client came back and said things were broke…so I pointed them to the old site where they were broke. Then they fixed the new site and while not happy, at least accepted that we had completed a high fidelity migration.
Around the same time, we had another client who said "This thing has been broken for months" or some such hyperbole. So I wrote a shell script that would exit 1 if broken and 0 if not broken. I then used the almighty git bisect to test when exactly we had introduced the bug. It was 1 day prior to their complaint. I equipped my director with that information, and he pressed back. That press back helped move the relationship from transactional to partnership.
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Perhaps not the most fun, but perhaps it was.
I had to migrate a site from an in-house CMS backed by an Oracle database to a CMS built on Rails. I tried to get a data dump from the Oracle DBAs, but alas, they couldn't help me. So I curled the site. I then used Hpricot (a precursor to Nokogiri) to parse the HTML and grab the (inner) nodes that I wanted for the new pages.
We knew the client was particular and exacting, so I built the outer elements exactly like the old site. I then wired up our CMS to render the inner nodes. I then curled our CMS to get the pages.
I ran a character by character diff against each page on the two different sites. They were the same. The client came back and said things were broke…so I pointed them to the old site where they were broke. Then they fixed the new site and while not happy, at least accepted that we had completed a high fidelity migration.
Around the same time, we had another client who said "This thing has been broken for months" or some such hyperbole. So I wrote a shell script that would exit 1 if broken and 0 if not broken. I then used the almighty
git bisectto test when exactly we had introduced the bug. It was 1 day prior to their complaint. I equipped my director with that information, and he pressed back. That press back helped move the relationship from transactional to partnership.