Apropos of my previous post, I also want to say that if you do the math, i.e., the 4.5 months of work that I put into prepping the migration (mostly researching, writing, and testing code), you will see it started in early March, which means I sustained momentum on this project through the disruption of my life that was my partner announcing on April 8 that she was leaving the country and leaving on May 1.

I am proud of that. I did it by dint of

1) working on it a little bit every day, weekend or weekday, except for April 8 and May 1 themselves,

2) agreeing with my boss that while the massive disruption was ongoing, I would keep the CouchDB migration moving along, and be responsive to team needs and do small amounts of work, but not take on medium-sized additional projects like I normally would.

My brain works largely by momentum, and I knew that if I took time away from this project, even if everyone understood and supported that decision, even just a weekend, it would be hell trying to pick it back up again, and I would be making my own life easier with my minimum daily quota.

This is why in the last few years, cahn's job has been to hold me accountable for various quotas, mostly German study and Peter Keith writing.

I'm hoping to finish the current batch of Peter Keith writing in the next week or two, and then get back to other things, like German study and reading! I miss reading.

On Wednesday, I performed one of the biggest/hardest/scariest database migrations of my career, from CouchDB to Postgres. It took 11 intense hours to complete, the culmination of 4 and a half months of work, but it went off without a hitch (to everyone's surprise, mine most of all; I was expecting to have to debug issues along the way).

This is something my boss has been saying the company needs to do for at least 5 years. He brings it up at executive meetings and tries to get the company to allocate resources to the migration. But everybody else always had higher priorities.

Two years ago, he told me our team didn't have the skills and the engineering team would have to do it. I mean, we (I) would do the database part, but they would have to write all the code.

Last year, one of the engineers on my team and I pulled off a couple major database migrations by ourselves--again without a hitch--that had my boss going, "Actually, I think the two of you could do it!"

Then, this year, when it finally got prioritized, I actually volunteered to do it myself, because I thought I finally had the skills.

And I did! I pulled it off! It's one of the biggest engineering triumphs at our company. And my doing it meant everybody else could keep working on their major projects and nothing had to be delayed to make this happen.

On Thursday, my boss asked what would make me feel appreciated. I responded with the two most me things ever:

One, I wanted him to lead the team meeting on Friday so I could take a long walk and dial in without having to share my screen and walk us through the slide deck. (Also, it ended up being super windy, so I could barely talk at all.)

Two, when he commented that he noticed I had already started a MySQL to Postgres migration, I was like, "Yeah, that was going to be the other thing I asked for: let me focus on that next."

IOW, my reaction to being praised for work is to ask to do more work. :P

Also, also! While I was out for my walk, the VP of Engineering came back from an executive business trip and discovered we had completely eliminated CouchDB from our system. He started posting the below in Slack channels with hundreds of people across the company, so everyone could appreciate this accomplishment. (Note that CouchDB *per se* is not a problem, it's how we had it implemented at our company. I don't want to badmouth CouchDB, which is a perfectly fine database if you use it right.)

Here is what he said:

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Over the past 3–5 years, it's hard to count how many times we've heard some version of "CouchDB is a huge risk." But while many of us have voiced the concern, Mildred actually took action.

Their work to fully remove CouchDB from our platform is a huge win—not just for reducing technical debt, but for improving our overall security posture. This change has a direct impact on our ability to meet and maintain the compliance standards we hold ourselves to.

Even more importantly, it eliminates a system none of us had deep expertise in, which clears the path for a healthier, more sustainable platform going forward.

Thank you for your leadership and execution, mildred_of_midgard—this is real impact.

My knee has been doing a bit better in the last week, as well as my hamstrings. Once the weather cools off a bit (it's been in the low to mid 30s Celsius), I'm hoping to try another long walk. I'm fine with shorter walks at those temperatures, but 12 hours is a bit much.

Speaking of which, my partner and I had this funny exchange:

Me: Hopefully no thunderstorms this weekend.
Me: It's hard to plan 12-hour walks if you know it might lightning on you.
Her: yeah
Her: i mean, i believe you, i don't really know what 12 hr walks are
Her: even as a concept, it's a bit like "not even light can escape a black hole", ok I trust you, but I don't understand
Me: 😂