Deflating
2026-10-09

For the past year I've been grinding hard on a large migration project 
at work. The task was to build a new in-house VoIP platform to parity 
with a third party PBX and migrate thousands of customers, and their
tens of thousands of phones, onto it before our contract with the old 
vendor ends. We shipped the first component of the new system in
November 2025, put the first customer on the new platform in February,
and now, finally, the end is in sight, with only a few dozen customers 
left to move and a month remaining to tear down the old system before
the contract deadline.

It has been an absolute slog. My team is very lean for the scope and
timeline we were given, at some points just myself and one other
engineer working on the project, and I was coming into this with no
prior VoIP experience. Many lessons we learned the hard way, in late
night deployment windows and painful incident calls. I've been working
long hours essentially the entire summer, running migrations at night
and waking up early to check the health of migrated phones before
business hours, then grinding through the day to work through bugs
and feature gaps. Rinse and repeat. 

It was dispiriting to watch as many of our forward steps were rolled 
back along the way in response to bugs, configuration issues, and 
confusion in the new system. This was a natural consequence of
prioritizing speed over all. Quality, robustness, and reliability were
secondary concerns. I'm happy with the progress we've made on
these fronts over the past few months, but our pace on this project
caused pain for some customers and lost trust that will take time to
rebuild.

As we reach the end, I'm feeling a huge weight lifting. We are hitting
the goal, on time, and I'm finally able to step back a little bit.
There will always be more to do, but the project is ending, and the
work is changing. I will be happy to shift focus to new features and
reliability, and to return to normal working hours. Maybe I'll even
take a vacation one of these days.

-qbasiq