RosemaryLong.com

One of the best things about something new is all the firsts that get to be experienced.  In a new relationship, it’s the first kiss, first holiday together, first “I love you”.  With a new car you can take it for your first ride home, first drive through, first carwash.  Even with a new packaged product I savour tearing the perforations that will only hold together once.  Today I experienced a first at my new job.  Before I explain let me tell you about the old way.

At Critical Mass, there are people called Release Engineers whose main role (among many) is to manage the transport of digital components that comprise a website.  They are the digital ushers that make sure that code, images, configuration files, everything gets deployed onto the testing and live environments.  A web developer would typically submit their workings into a repository with a certain identifying tag, and the Release Engineers would gather the files to carry them along their merry way.

At Applied, there is no such role.  A developer is responsible for pushing their own code and assets to the review and production servers, and we do so by running neat little command line executions.  (Yes, I even bugged that Release Engineers that they could be replaced by very small scripts.)

Today, the boss* was gone.  He instructed me to watch for changes, and left me in the hands of the marketing director who also had strong involvement in the project.  It is a real estate website selling ranches and other community homes.  I finished the last changes and was instructed to put the changes up.  Now, I should’ve known that things have to go to review before production, but with my brain on autopilot and digesting information on how to create a Facebook app, I asked which server it should go on.  She asked me what the difference was, and as I gave URLs as the main differentiating point (not very clear), she told me to put the changes up on production.  I had test data in to demonstrate what the price column would look like, so all the properties (including a ranch the size of Monaco) was on sale for $4 million dollars.  Later that afternoon the salesperson for the property called, and luckily the marketing director fielded the call.  This brought me back to my days on Mercedes-Benz where we’d spend hours upon hours just making sure that the pricing and disclaimers were correct, just in case. The entire time, all I could hear in my head was the Release Engineer Manager’s warning, “Just wait until something goes wrong, then what will you do?”  Well, I just moved quickly and drew upon the support of my new team.  I have to thank the marketing director for her patience through this whole ordeal, and also my coworker and deskmate for his calm instructions on how to roll back the changes and restore the live site.

Now, I’m just hoping that my boss doesn’t read this blog, otherwise everything will be juuuuust as normal. 

*I use the word boss only because I don’t want to use names.  He is my oversight and manager, I guess you’d say.  There really is no hierarchy.