Engineering a successful product launch

How not to do a big bang that causes a big bang

James Stanier
The Startup

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Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash.

Panic, panic!

It’s the day before launch.

The engineering team looks frantic. There are empty takeaway coffee cups across their desks, in the bin, and on the floor. Kelly is slouched over her keyboard looking at her monitor through her fingers. It’s the loading prompt, and it’s still loading, even after three minutes.

“This just can’t be possible,” she remarks. “How come we’ve never had any issues with the loading speed until now?”

A Slack message from QA.

Ash: Why is it throwing an Internal Server Error every time you change the date range to last month?

Kelly: What?

Ash: Try it out, see if it happens for you too.

Kelly: ARGH, let me have a look…

Bringing up the Chrome developer console, she feels the subtle change in air movement as someone approaches her.

“I’m really sorry to interrupt you, K.”

It’s Evan, the infrastructure engineer. Kelly tries not to get frustrated and scoots back…

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James Stanier
The Startup

Writing things that interest me. Hopefully they'll interest you as well.