Just a brief check-in. Setting up a MySQL environment for manual testing on a mac mini and then moving on to tickets #362 and #363.

I'm on my fourth rewrite of the ManyToMany migrations, on one hand really wanting to learn to do this right, but on the other this only applies to two fields and for past suborg applications: years that the suborg applied but was not selected, and years the suborg participated in GSoC. Its questionable how important retaining this data is.

On a personal note I've been having a lot of trouble focusing on GSoC work. Three kilometers from me we've had police and now federal paramilitary soldiers attacking protesters, blanketing he region around our federal courthouse in a thick blanket of chemical weapons, and challenging the inalienable right to free speech that serves as a foundation our democratic republic. We often hear gun shots at night (which we hope are at least rubber bullets and not lethal ammunition) and terrifying news reports of my neighbors being wounded, even our mayor being tear gassed. This has persisted for 2 months now, for the duration of GSoC with no end in sight.

Work must continue, but is made especially difficult by all this. Its been an exercise in learning how to center myself so I can focus on my work.

I've been continuing on the code cleanup and database, running face first into Django's dreaded ManyToMany. This bridges into a related problem of having a binary sqlite3 database in the code repository instead of a proper testing framework where temporary databases are created by the testing tool.

Work is available in PR but not ready for merging yet.

I've set aside Django 3 migration work for a bit to focus on cleaning up the codebase and database queries. 

More on this later this week.

I've been continuing to migrate to Django 3, which at this point should only be pending updating the unit test suite. Since this work has involved pulling several abandoned dependencies into our source tree and many of these tests use obsolete methods of running, this has involved a tedious migration to Django's newer test framework.

The code so far is on a pending Github pull request, pending completion of the test suite migration but by all appearances otherwise complete.