My next steps for Drupal 8 migration

To expand on the “Going forward” section of my last blog post, there’s still a lot of work to be done to get the migration ecosystem for Drupal 8 up to the level it was for Drupal 7 - as well as taking it beyond, as I believe the D8 architecture enables far more powerful and flexible tools. As an independent consultant, I have a more flexible schedule and more time for pure community work, but with great flexibility comes great… dithering.

Source: http://xkcd.com/1445/
s/STRATEGY/ISSUE/
s/EFFICIENT/URGENT/

Without the focus provided by a paying client, I often find myself spending far too much time triaging the work, and too little actually doing the work. I’m also most productive when I can do a deep dive - a few solid hours embedded in one particular area - as opposed to flitting about from the highest priority issue here, to the highest priority issue there (context switches are expensive). So, going forward I’m experimenting with a different approach. Basically, I will have a stack of post-its for the various areas I need to work on, and each time I have at least a couple of uncommitted hours I’ll simply take the top thing off that stack and work on it, without worrying (too much) about whether it’s the “optimal” thing to work on at that moment. In no particular order (I’m already fighting the urge to spend an hour prioritizing the list), my initial stack looks like:

• Core issue queue support - I’ve been focusing lately on the contrib side, and need to get reengaged on core issues.
• XML/JSON source plugins (continuing the work to normalize them around a common Url source plugin in migrate_plus).
• Other migrate_plus work (reviewing and committing the interesting work going on in https://www.drupal.org/node/2642612, fleshing out the examples, etc.).
• migrate_tools, particularly developing the UI (and firstly making what there is of it so far work under 8.1.x).
• Moving the migrate-upgrade command into core drush.
• Custom Drupal-to-Drupal tools (D8 version of migrate_d2d).
• D7 migration support (hopefully just one half-day to get caught up on the issue queues I’ve been neglecting while focusing on D8).
• Business - in particular, fleshing out my Virtuoso Performance site. Step 1 accomplished - first blog post! Next, migrating all the tech content from my personal site to here...
• D8 version of wordpress_migrate (to be added to the stack once the XML support is stable).

Hopefully the experiment doesn’t end up like this:

Source: http://xkcd.com/874/