Leap Day Release

(February 29)

While most of you were hopefully doing something unique and fulfilling on your gift day of the year, I was at work.  It was a special day of work, though, as I got the green light to do my first software production release since I joined this company.  Now, as software engineers will tell you, often we develop the software but do not deploy it -- that is to say we do not install it in the production environments.  In some cases though, we get to wear two hats and do the development AND the installation.  Today is one of those cases; it won't always work out this way.

It's a cool thing to be able to deploy your own software, but there was the inevitable surprise in the form of user access to the production servers.  I needed to rethink my production scripts on the fly -- later I'm going to have to redo the whole installation.  Oh well.

The analogy I came up with is that I've been training for the big race in a car with an automatic transmission, and when the big race day finally comes and I'm shown the race car, it turns out that I'd better figure out how to drive a manual pretty darn quick :-)

(March 5)

Following the initial release on Leap Day, I found myself involved in a flurry of weekend troubleshooting, although my role was pretty much "on demand deployer."  Not too exciting, but you gotta do what you gotta do!

Monday morning, the team held a well-earned celebration including this cake.  The company is called Konditor Meister, and if you poke around their web site, you will see some amazing stuff.  The cake was exceptional -- really.