Yesterday was an emotional roller coaster of brutality and awesomeness, mixed with a good share of productivity. The day started off innoculously enough. I checked my incoming tickets, went through my email for tasks to do on my projects, scrummed with the team, and enjoyed a delicious steak lunch on the house...
Waah? Steak lunch at Porterhouse? Thanks to our awesome admin, Jules, Kyle, Lee, and myself got to relax and chat over some juicy meat and a cold beer. I had an especially good time talking to Lee since I haven't made a big effort to talk to coworkers outside the dev team. It made me appreciate what it takes to run a company efficiently, and also what kinds of features other internal users care about. Kyle's sexy and all, but I get to see and talk to him everyday :).
Lunch was fantastic, but as I drew closer and closer to dinner time, the situation looked worse and worse. The planned upgrade time for our 105 customer environments was scheduled to occur at 6:00pm. I felt like I had a good grasp of the bugs I was working on, so I thought I'd lend a hand to the Operations team by making one of my slow migrations run faster so they could go home earlier. In doing so, I realized that my migration wasn't comprehensive enough to cover all the bad cases. I was super thankful that this bug was caught with only 15 minutes left before the scheduled downtime.
Of course, when I found this bug, I felt uneasy deploying the changes without some heavy duty QA. I thought I would stick around just to make sure the migrations wouldn't croak. I thought to myself, how long could this possibly take?
We started the process off by disabling customers from accessing the application and putting a placeholder HTML page. Seggy quickly cancel'ed this action because his phone started getting notifications from Pingdom because the site uptime checkers hadn't been paused. Next the migrations were run for all the instances and they seemed to work ok. I breathed a sigh of relief, and told Wendy that I'd be heading home at any moment...
An hour or so later, we were finally able to check off the verification tasks in Google Docs for some custom PDF template changes. These were super annoying to deal with and didn't work right away because we had bad merge data between trunk and stable. But we did finish, I breathed a fresh sigh, and I apologized to Wendy and reassured her again that I'd be leaving soon...
Another hour or so later, we solved custom LDAP mixin code for the single customer who used LDAP. Because we refactored out most of our config to use Simpleconfig, we were having issues deciding where to put the custom LDAP code. This lead to a wild goose chase because the load order of when the custom code was mixed in determined if it worked or not. Worse yet, we found another code error where the LDAP authentication code wasn't run at all. This took some diff-ing and merging to fix up.
I finally left the office 5 minutes to 11pm. My heart was pumping like mad from fixing those problems, my stomach was growling like crazy, and my brain was turning off at an exponential rate. It was quite a rush to help out with the deployment. The key lesson I took away from that was how big a maintenance nightmare customer-specific features are. I understand why they were done, but if they weren't there, none of the problems would've shown up and we would've finished hours ago.
I had already thought Lee and Seggy were amazing coworkers, but now I have a new level of respect for them. I'm also super sorry to Wendy and Serena for putting up with us taking so long. I felt especially guilty that the custom PDF templates wasn't a smooth transition because I wrote the fixes for it.