Are we there yet? - the four words parents dread, 5 minutes into a 12 hour road trip. At the outset they know full well they'll hear this question repeated on the regular. Unfortunately, it's all-too-similar to the feeling an engineer gets while running long migration and data extraction jobs.
You might have dozens of gigabytes of data or millions of records to export between systems. The tasks culminate to an assignment that, to you, feels miles long. Your boss, however, compares the project to the length of the fish he just caught.
- "It's a 2-foot migration. Did I tell you about the fish I caught this weekend? Let me tell you again."
In times past, we used email to keep everyone in sync with the status of jobs. Our teams saw a huge improvement to this with the introduction of Confluence, a team collaboration software by Atlassian. Still, realtime feedback remained a challenge, especially in long running batch jobs with an unknown number of people needing to be clued into the operation's progress.
Enter HipChat.
We've been using HipChat now for several months, shortly after our long-time partners Atlassian acquired the company. It's a cool little tool that has a slight twist on traditional group instant messaging. In our case, the product has suited us perfectly. Our engineering team, for instance, got a huge increase in efficiency and team transparency from HipChat. Here's what they did:
- Rooms can be created easily and by anyone. In this case we created a room for a specific project.
- We asked the engineers working on a given project (located in 3 different timezones) to place their status updates in the HipChat room.
- The project manager then took the latest status updates and updated the client (by phone or email) over the weekend during the migration.
- HipChat could also capture some additional items, like key screen shots along the way.
- We pasted in error messages and key statistics. This meant that we had an accurate time sequence of when things happened.
- Did I mention that the project manager could check the status on his iPhone?
At the end of the project, we captured the transcript from HipChat (yes - HipChat is persistent!), and we can now use it during our project review meeting. The transcript HipChat provided is also proving useful for training our newest engineers. They're now able to see all the steps and "interesting situations" that come up during long-running overnight batch jobs.
We welcome HipChat to our family of tools and for helping us Share the Knowledge, Delight our Customers and answering the question "Are we there yet?".
