That took longer than expected… but I’ve finally migrated Rookeries to use PostgreSQL 10! I finished the majority of the raw migration work about a week before PyCon Canada. However I did not want to confuse my updates and tweets related to PyCon Canada with my work on Rookeries. Also I wanted to add a few bits of polish, create a mailing list for Rookeries and fix up any issues I found with the site. (Quite a few data and TLS certificate issues happened along with this release.)

I found that migrating Rookeries from CouchDB to PostgreSQL quite challenging. This adds yet another data point to those that argue that fixing data models and databases can be significantly harder than fixing applications. One of the challenges I stumbled in was mapping the various keys in a CouchDB document for a resource, into a table. Fortunately the JSONB columns allowed for the flexibility to let me resolve some of my earlier problematic data designs later on. I also needed to familiarize myself with diesel.rs, the amazing ORM/database engine library for Rust. I struggled with understanding how custom types worked in Rust, and why they make database mapping of columns easy for more advanced mappings (like optionally nullable, JSONB and Array). However I managed to figure out even the hard parts using a combination of the documentation and by peeking into the test cases for diesel. Having a migration tool in the companion diesel-cli utility, provides the nicest UX for building out database migrations and mapping them to code. Overall the effort paid off and I am convinced that Rust has one of the cleanest and maintainable ORM/database libraries I’ve seen.

As mentioned earlier, I created a mailing list dedicated to Rookeries updates. I will continue to blog about releases, but if you are interested in the internals and development of Rookeries, then this mailing list a good thing to follow. Consider it like a journal that you can also reply back to and enter in a conversation about the development of Rookeries. I added a panel to the side of the site, that makes subscribing to Rookeries easy.

This will hopefully will be the last of the major technological shifts for the project, at least on the backend. The next releases I plan on concentrating on getting Rookeries in a state where I can drive Gatsby powered static sites via REST APIs. Once that becomes a reality, I will work on replacing my WordPress sites with Rookeries powered sites.