Launching the new broadband.com
I pulled my first late-late night at work Thursday night and Friday morning this week to launch the new broadband.com. We actually had a lot of fun coding pepped up on pizza and caffeine. I stayed until 4:30am and was the last of the team to leave, but our (awesome) boss kept working on content and ended up sleeping on a couch at work. I drove home and slept for about three hours then headed back in for the final push.
Friday was a day of fun and games (and launch t-shirts!) celebrating the site launch which was scheduled for 4pm. We were still heads down working on getting all the pieces together and, whew!, got completely deployed at 3:45pm. Just in time for the official launch but after the launch party down the street had started. :-)
Launch party? Yeah, I’d never had one of those either. The company rented out the party room at Rally Point and our whole company group (about 40 people) was in full attendance. I gotta say, it was a lot of fun to be cheered and applauded while drinking free beer and grooving to the awesome music of Mystery Sushi.
It was definitely a crunch for the team, and happily we came together perfectly. We have two primarily backend developers and I’m one of two frontend devs. Our backend guys really turned it all out this week too. At the start of the week we had no full production servers, and now we have some kind of crazy auto load balancing cluster of web and database servers all out on Amazon. It was pretty amazing to catch glimpses of that while we coded out the rails site.
IE almost ruined my whole day on Friday, but I got it at least to the point of functionality. (Yeah, we are explicitly allowed to treat IE as a second-class browser.)
Special shoutout to comfortable mexican sofa. The best CMS I’ve ever used. We need to refactor huge swaths of our site, but the system itself is pure gold.
Yeah, the site isn’t perfect (yet), but it’s out there.
