I wanted the experiment to be over.
“I want to get really aggressive.”
The target in my note was every Shutterstock and Bigstock file.
Earlier in the year, MogileFS had been a research project. I had talked with people who were already using it and proposed building a test pool of our own. By July, I wanted the conversation to move toward the real libraries.
Image storage was not a side system at Shutterstock. The files were the inventory, and the products depended on being able to store and retrieve them reliably.
Bigstock added another real library to the same proposal. I was not asking to import a sample from either product. I was asking us to talk about all of the content.
That was why the word “aggressive” mattered to me. I did not want MogileFS to remain an interesting system that we kept discussing while the existing libraries continued to grow.
“Let's chat Monday” was the entire next step in the email.
There was no approved sequence yet. No import rate. No start date. No completed migration. I was asking for the team to sit down and decide how seriously we were going to pursue it.
Moving every file was an ambitious target. It was not an outcome yet. Monday was for the conversation that came before the plan.
I sent the note from my iPhone on Sunday afternoon. It was short because I was not trying to solve the migration by email. I wanted the question waiting for us when the week started: are we ready to move from exploring this system to putting real content into it?
I wanted us to start moving the actual libraries. First, we had to talk.