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 nine months, I was still one of the new guys. Some of the development teams had crunched for more than a year. They had eaten lunches and dinners brought in by the client every day of the week.

Countdown and launch

We’d had at least six different “official” launch dates. Three months of load testing and emergency code changes. Two whole management teams. Three targets for the required user load level (each revised downward). Today, however, was the day of triumph. All the toil and frustration, the forgotten friends, and the divorces were going to fade away after we launched.

The marketing team, many of whom hadn’t been seen since the last of the requirements-gathering meetings two years earlier, gathered in a grand conference room for the launch ceremony, with champagne to follow. The technologists who had turned their vague and ill-specified dreams into reality gathered around a wall full of laptops and monitors that we set up to watch the health of the site.

Site in production

At 9 a.m., the program manager hit the big red button. The new site appeared like magic on the big screen in the grand conference room. The new site was live and in production.

Of course, the real change had been initiated by the content delivery ...