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I’m Scot McSweeny-Roberts and I’m one of the software developers here at findmypast.co.uk. I thought I would let you know about one of the projects that all of us in the development team have been busy with over the last few months, namely our infrastructure upgrade.
One of the more challenging parts of software development is keeping up with the latest versions of the tools and technologies that we use to build and run our site with and it can be quite easy to get left behind with an environment that is unsupported or difficult to maintain. Besides general issues of support and maintenance, new versions also bring new features that we want to use to make the site even better, which is why over the last few months we’ve been migrating our code over to use the latest and greatest versions of our tools(*).
Scot McSweeny-Roberts
Upgrading software can sometimes be difficult as what used to work in a previous version might work differently or not at all in the latest version. Those differences can be subtle and lead to several days of work figuring out why something that used to work perfectly fine no longer does and then getting it to work correctly again. This can involve spending hours looking at source code you would never normally look at - personally, I now know more about a type of software known as a ‘Transaction Manager’ than I ever really wanted to know.
Once we had working versions of the site running our local machines, it was time to run a copy of the site on a test server. The test server is meant to be as similar as possible to a production server and occasionally surprises pop up due to differences between our local machines and the test server.
Once everything is running as expected on the test server it’s time to move it over to the production servers, which means an early morning for some of our team members as they make sure that everything still runs smoothly after switching over.
All the work involved is worth it though as newer tools are generally better tools. We’ll now be able to develop new features for the site in far less time and we’ll have more flexibility when it comes to scalability.
(*) While we were in the process upgrading, a very important bit of software known as the application server had an entirely new release. Sometimes new can be too new, so in this case we’ve stuck with the slightly older but potentially more stable version.
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One of the more challenging parts of software development is keeping up with the latest versions of the tools and technologies that we use to build and run our site with and it can be quite easy to get left behind with an environment that is unsupported or difficult to maintain. Besides general issues of support and maintenance, new versions also bring new features that we want to use to make the site even better, which is why over the last few months we’ve been migrating our code over to use the latest and greatest versions of our tools(*).
Scot McSweeny-RobertsUpgrading software can sometimes be difficult as what used to work in a previous version might work differently or not at all in the latest version. Those differences can be subtle and lead to several days of work figuring out why something that used to work perfectly fine no longer does and then getting it to work correctly again. This can involve spending hours looking at source code you would never normally look at - personally, I now know more about a type of software known as a ‘Transaction Manager’ than I ever really wanted to know.
Once we had working versions of the site running our local machines, it was time to run a copy of the site on a test server. The test server is meant to be as similar as possible to a production server and occasionally surprises pop up due to differences between our local machines and the test server.
Once everything is running as expected on the test server it’s time to move it over to the production servers, which means an early morning for some of our team members as they make sure that everything still runs smoothly after switching over.
All the work involved is worth it though as newer tools are generally better tools. We’ll now be able to develop new features for the site in far less time and we’ll have more flexibility when it comes to scalability.
(*) While we were in the process upgrading, a very important bit of software known as the application server had an entirely new release. Sometimes new can be too new, so in this case we’ve stuck with the slightly older but potentially more stable version.
More...