On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 2:40 AM Magnus Manske via Wikitech-l wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
As someone who has been migrating a lot of tools, and who has been at times upset^W frustrated at some of the proverbial devils of the details, I want to thank Bryan, and everyone involved, for the sustained effort to keep toolforge going into the future, and congratulations on a job well done.
Thank you very much Magnus for those words of support. As you very well know yourself, the folks who build things to help others are more likely to hear about frustrations when their efforts have fallen short than they are to hear praise when they are succeeding. Hearing from you and others that we are on the correct path goes a long way towards keeping up the energy to continue.
In that spirit, I would like to name a few folks specifically who have chopped more wood and carried more water in the final push to the deadline than even I had hoped they would. David Caro, Taavi Väänänen, and Seyram Komla Sapaty all put in great amounts of time and effort over the last few months to make this project as successful as possible.
David went above and beyond in to try and ensure that Toolforge had the technical capabilities needed to allow even less widely used runtime languages to migrate. Go stalk him a bit on Phabricator to see the patience and attention he used to help specific tools make it across, and be sure to check out the many "My first Buildpack" tutorials that he helped publish.
Taavi carried on a Toolforge admin tradition of finding ways to use Toolforge itself to provide new features for others by making a reusable custom image for running Pywikibot scripts using Build Service. He also spent quite a lot of extra time helping folks 1 on 1 with questions via IRC and Phabricator.
Komla used every means he could think of to try and contact folks who's tools were in need of attention--Phabricator tickets, Talk page messages, direct emails, tracking down SUL accounts for Developer accounts that were not responsive. He also kept the rest of us on the Toolforge admin team informed of counts of tools remaining and trends in feedback to consider. He should have had the honor of sending the final shutdown announcement yesterday, but all 3 of his different ISPs were disrupted by undersea cable cuts![0]
I would actually like to name one more person, Nicholas Skaggs, as having been critical to the final steps in converting from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. Nicholas was the manager of the Wikimedia Cloud Services team from June 2020 through February 2024. Nicholas had extreme faith in the abilities of the team and the larger technical community. He urged us to complete the difficult work needed for the migration rather than putting it off yet again with "just one more" upgrade of the Grid exec and control nodes. I and others will miss his leadership at the Foundation and wish him well in the next phase of his career.
[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/undersea-cable-failures-cause-internet-disruptio...
Bryan -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation Principal Software Engineer Boise, ID USA [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] irc: bd808