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While we're big proponents of continual upkeep for your technology infrastructure, sometimes you need a big lift to propel an aging infrastructure into the modern era. And we're so proud to share that we've done it again- this time for a major state government agency. The South Dakota Department of Transportation (SDDOT) used a vendor-hosted, custom CMS system. The previous hosting provider's contract was at the end of its life, and SDDOT needed a technology partner to help them migrate 1500+ unique pages worth of content onto a modern CMS system.  The client chose Umbraco as their target platform. We were given access to raw SQL dumps of the existing CMS. Our team analyzed the structure of the site content from the various SQL Server Tables and developed a strategy for migrating that content to Umbraco: Export the SQL tables as JSON, ensuring no data truncation. Convert the UTF-16 encoded data to UTF-8 for ease of use in Python Create custom Python command line tools that read the JSON files and make REST API calls to Umbraco Move one page [...]

It is exciting to start a new software project. There's the dream of all the capabilities it will have. Nothing quite rivals the cool factor of having breathed life into something wholly new that taps your expertise in the marketplace. With agile processes, it's possible to build an MVP app and then iterate and grow it into a product that fits your customer. This is common practice amongst full-time software development teams. But what often gets overlooked is that modern software requires continual upkeep. Like anything built by humans, it can start to weather and decay without preventative maintenance. If the gutters on the house aren't cleaned, they can clog, leading to water intruding into the structure, causing rot and black mold. Similarly, if a software product isn't routinely patched to address security vulnerabilities, your application could fail, your user data could be exfiltrated, or you could face a massive and surprising cloud hosting bill. Or, if you don't pay attention by instrumenting your code with alarms and continual monitoring, a site that's working one day might just be returning [...]