Countdown and Launch

Launch day

After years of work, the day of launch finally arrived. I had joined this huge team (more than three hundred in total) nine months earlier to help build a complete replacement for a retailer’s online store, content management, customer service, and order-processing systems. Destined to be the company’s backbone for the next ten years, it was already more than a year late when I joined the team. For the previous nine months, I had been in crunch mode: taking lunches at my desk and working late into the night. A Minnesota winter will test your soul even under the best of times. Dawn rises late, and dusk falls early. None of us had seen the sun for months. It often felt like an inescapable Orwellian nightmare. We had crunched through spring, the only season worth living here for.

One night I went to sleep in winter, and the next time I looked around, I realized summer had arrived. After ...