Lessons learned

Posted by Amit on 30 Nov, 2007

We hadn’t even imagined all the crazy things we would run into trying to launch our fairly simple web application! We have taken, what at least in our opinion is a fairly rational approach to software development – we carefully restrict features, work incrementally, write lots of tests and refactor mercilessly, even picked a fun technology stack. We then cleared a path to enable a one-button deployment – to drive an as-fast-as-possible turnaround-cycle.

Still, we’ve had to push our alpha date out, twice so far. Why? Lets just say that we got re-acquainted with Mr. Murphy, rather well. We had thought that a rather critical component of our back-end infrastructure would be simple to set up and use, since it almost exclusively involved only off-the-shelf stuff. Therefore, we planned to do it just before the actual launch date. You know, sort of the last thing we would do before going live. Of course, we ran into one road-block after another.

First, our internet connection died on us and since we’re self-hosted, that left us dead in the water. Our team is distributed, and we need VNC access to our servers, so that didn’t help productivity at all. It turned out, the reason was that we had forgotten to pay the internet bill! And this being India, it took our ISP two and a half days to get us back online even after we paid the bill. Boy, was that frustrating!

Then, we spent 2 weeks trying to get a piece of hardware to work, only to discover it wasn’t compatible with the OS we were using.  It never complained or informed us about the actual problem, it just gave strange and unhelpful errors… We spent days scratching our heads. Talk about making assumptions that can bite you on the behind!

Next, we learned an important lesson: many laptops don’t have COM ports. At least, none of the ones we were planning to use had any! We had planned on using a couple of old laptops for a part of our back-end, and a COM port was the only real requirement from the aging machines. When we looked, we found that there was no such port! We lost a several days trying to arrange new hardware…

How about that? We’re more hopeful that things will go better from here on… but who knows? We’re keeping our fingers crossed… and hope that we can actually be live soon. The lesson – double-check everything, and then check it all again!

Any of you folks got more stories to share?