update

The migration shipped. The old Angular app is off, the React one is what everyone uses now, and the whole thing ended with a deploy on a Tuesday and lunch at this Mexican spot in town and the redeeming quality of their food was how big the margarita was. Half a year of work and the best possible outcome was nobody noticing anything happened. I'm learning that's what good infrastructure work feels like.

I'm working on my own now rewriting the international dealer locator, which is currently JSP pages older than some of the interns. View source on the old one is a museum exhibit, tables for layout, inline onclick handlers, the works. The rewrite is React, hooks this time, and being the only dev on it means every decision is mine, which is equal parts great and terrifying.

The other thing is I joined the UX team. Deere has an internal design system called FUEL, and we maintain it, and the new project is a component library, basically forking Bootstrap and rebuilding the pieces as React components that follow FUEL standards, so teams across the company can pull buttons and forms and nav that already look and behave like Deere instead of hand-rolling their own slightly wrong versions. It's humbling work in a way feature work isn't and I hate it a lot of the time. You find out how many opinions can exist about a button. Spacing, focus states, disabled states, what happens when the label is too long, whether the loading spinner replaces the text or sits next to it. I used to consume component libraries and assume someone smart figured all this out in an afternoon. It's months. It's going to be months.

The dealer locator also dragged me somewhere I didn't expect, analytics. The old JSP pages had tracking wired through them and the rewrite can't lose it, so I've been learning Adobe Launch, which is how the tags get on the page, and enough Adobe Analytics to know what the tags are for. There's a data layer, there are eVars and props and events, and I could not currently explain the difference between an eVar and a prop with any confidence, but I'm getting there. The interesting part is seeing what the business actually looks at. Someone in marketing pulls up a report of how many people searched for a dealer and in what country and makes decisions off it, and if my rewrite breaks a tag, that report quietly goes wrong and nobody knows until someone asks why Brazil disappeared. I never realized this was how the internet worked. You know when people say, “the algorithm” I think they mean stuff like this. It's growing on me.

Loki update since that's apparently a feature of this blog now, he survived his first real winter and has decided snow is food. Also we woke up one morning with 18 inches of snow and I had never seen anything like that before. EVER!