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let the robots do the work!
Tuesday, October 10 2017
I worked a long day today, something over 13 hours. We were putting the new WooCommerce-based store live, and I had to be there for the whole thing. It didn't go completely as smoothly as I'd hoped, but we were ultimately successful. This morning, I did a bunch of work to convert a script that had done the first move of products from the old store to the new store so that it would instead update all the new store's products with info from those products in the old store. But something was amiss in the script, and it kept blowing away essential WordPress post meta data. I could've fixed it, but when my debugging dragged into the afternoon, I felt like I was burning sunlight on the launch date, so I asked the others if it was okay if they handled the updates manually, since the plan was for them to go over the entire catalog manually anyway. They agreed, though I don't think any of us knew how much work that would be. Their manual update of the new store's product catalog ended up taking hours, and it was fraught by human error and galling failures of WooCommerce's user interface, which gives the impression you've saved data when you actually haven't. I felt bad about how long all that took, and the lesson learned is that it always pays to perfect the automation script, even if its only ever going to be run once. Get the logic right and let the robots do the work!
The new store ended up going live at around 10:00pm Eastern Time, and I celebrated by drinking some booze shortly thereafter. At that point I joked on Slack, "if you need me for anything i'm still pretty sober." One final task I had to do was fixing a product XML feed, which required me to learn yet more stuff I didn't necessarily want to know about WordPress's way of being a generic relational database system.
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