Posted by Matthew Bernardin in Question for the Candidates – The Site Changeover

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Election Coodinator) in Question for the Candidates – The Site Changeover
These questions are for every ticket. Let’s give you all something topical to talk about, hmm?

Two weeks ago, we finally switched from our old site using Drupal 5 to our new site, after a lot of people spent a lot of time talking about doing that in various forms for the past 10 years or so. It was a big deal and affected everybody in the entire club. Even though we like to talk about this as a technical project, it was also an organizational one as well, which actually required the President and pretty much the entire club government to work together to get us through the switch. I don’t think we’ll have to change the site again, but we might come across problems that would need the same sort of coordination in the future, so I think it’s worth knowing how you all thought it went and what (if anything) you might do differently.

1. How do you think the change went? I mean specifically the event of changing from the old site to the new site that happened on June 23 of this year.
2. Imagine that you and your running mate were the President and Vice President this term. Is there anything you would have done differently than the current President and Vice President with regards to this change?

I know the second one there might be a little unfair to Sidney and Tony because their ticket doesn’t have any members of TECH on it and thus may not have the full context with which to answer (since there was lots of “behind the scenes” discussion before the thing kicked off), so I’ll allow any candidate to ask me for any context about the situation this term either publicly or privately before they give their “official” answer to that question.

I will ask follow up questions based upon your answers, most likely.

Joe

Sorry for my tardiness on this when we’ve been pretty hard charging from the start, gotta love IRL hell.

1. The day of the 23rd in my opinion was about as smooth as an android’s bottom based on how the change was implimented. From prior experience with migrations there is alot that can and will go wrong unexpectedly on a switch over and the more dissimilar the systems are that are being swapped out the more you have to be johnny on the spot cause murphy can and will bite you a new one. It was handled as quickly and professionally as possible on Joe’s end as debugger in chief.

Because I know your going to ask about the how it was implimented joe, how would I have done it differently. I would have had a running copy of the drupal site and forwarded to that while everything was being switched over and then had my susers, pdept and volunteers get setup and crawl through the front facing bits for a couple of hours before flicking it over. But that’s me, I wasn’t the lead and I say that because I have absolutely flummoxed the first couple of migrations I was in charge of beyond fubar and have learnt the hard way, so I’m probably a little more paranoid then you.

1. Yes and no. I’m of the don’t take a dump without a plan school and being both a. more techy then dan and b. more paranoid about migrations I would have probably asked alot more questions and insisted on alot more if all else fails contingency planning.

– Matt

With my limited knowledge of servers and such, I thought it went really well. I was not looking forward to the change over because I was very comfortable with the old site. However, the people who got the new site ready, were awesome! There was almost always someone in the Discord channel who could answer questions, and between them and the volunteers, it went much better than I had anticipated.

Very detailed instructions were written, addressing what we needed to do as FComms and COs, and we were given a lot of advanced notice. Almost all of the feedback I’ve heard has been positive, so, job well done!!

D…
Matt/D