![\"\"](\"https://ngx-ramblers.org.uk/api/aws/s3/site-content/ekwg-migration-burndown-october-2020.png\")
Archived from an email sent to the East Kent Walking Group committee on Thursday 22 October 2020, the day the last line of AngularJS left the site. It is kept here, word for word, because it marks the end of a seventeen-month migration done entirely by hand, long before there was any AI to help. A short reflection from 2026 follows at the end.
\nHi everyone,
\nTonight, I'm celebrating.
\nI'm having a nice big strong celebratory gin and tonic.
\nIn fact more than one. Something big happened today.... I finally managed to complete the migration of the EKWG website to the new angular framework from the "old" angularjs framework that I originally built the site with back in 2013.
\nWow, how two letters (js) can cause such turmoil and heartache, but this alas this is the dilemma that any software developer that attempts to embrace a new technology runs the risk of: obsolescence. e.g. Google (the author of angularjs) decided that it was out of date back in 2016 and everyone that had invested in it, better change.
\nOkay, so I dealt with that, which is what everything for the last year or so has been about. This morning I pushed a new version of the site with every bit of angularjs deleted and as far as I'm concerned... it still works.
\nSo... please let me know if you find any problems. In fact it should work better and faster than before as you only have to load one framework in your browser (not that I would expect you or anyone else to even know what a framework your browser is loading.)
\nBecause I know that you wouldn't be happy receiving an email from me without also having to wade through superfluous information that means nothing at all to you, let's get started with some conversion stats!
\n
So, TL;DR - this really means that between May 2019 and today, 10,149 lines of angularjs code got converted to the new framework. And you may be now interested to learn that the number of lines of EKWG code now stands at 20,571.
\nI'll be interested in whether anyone notices that the number of lines of EKWG code has now nearly doubled.
\nI'll come back to you about whether or not this is a problem. All I know is that the technology I've chosen is the best thing possible in 2020. I'm pretty sure that google will never come up with a change as big as what happened between 2016 and now. The problem is that we have been in a very fast moving period of web development and we either get behind it, or we get left behind. Right now, EKWG has the very latest website technology that could ever be selected and is about 10 years ahead of Ramblers website.
\nAs part of this work, I had to migrate a few old things and these are itemised as follows:
\nI know how important this page is for everyone so I decided to make some improvements to it as follows:
\nFull text search
\nThere is now the ability to perform a text search on articles on this page so that only the text that you enter into the Quick Search are listed.
\nAlso, for Committee members only, an additional selection field is shown that allows you to see how the how-to page would appear as if you were:
\nThis is how the how-to page now looks:
\n![\"\"](\"https://ngx-ramblers.org.uk/api/aws/s3/site-content/061d2c43-68f9-4431-a93f-2385774c760a.png\")
A facility existed on the old website that allowed a page to be displayed with a view of a letter head that could be used as a heading to an email template. I've now improved this so that it's much more useable.
\nIf you have any questions about the above, please don't hesitate to contact me. Best regards,
\nNick Barrett - Technical Support
\nReading this nearly six years on, three things stand out.
\nEvery one of those 10,149 lines was converted by hand. The burn-down chart above is a spreadsheet I updated after each session, and the flat stretches are the months when life got in the way. There was no AI to help in 2019; the tooling was an editor, a compiler and a lot of evenings. The same job today would be measured in days rather than a year and a half.
\nThe line count I was nervous about looks quaint now. In October 2020 the whole site was 20,571 lines and I wondered aloud whether nearly doubling was a problem. The Codebase Evolution snapshot taken on 3 September 2026 puts the platform at 336,946 lines of TypeScript, about sixteen times that figure, across 2,067 commits in three repositories since 2013. Almost all of that growth came after July 2024, when the codebase was still under 58,000 lines. What changed was not the ambition but the speed at which ideas could be turned into working code.
\nThe bet on staying current paid off. The site built for one group in 2013 became ng-ekwg in 2019, then ngx-ramblers in 2022, and now runs as a platform that any Ramblers group can adopt. The Angular framework I chose in 2019 is still the one it runs on, several major versions later, without another rewrite. The how-to page with its full text search is still in daily use.
\nThe rest of the story, with the charts, is on the Codebase Evolution snapshot, and the newer technical articles on this page pick up from where this email left off.
\n"}