OMA: One Month App

Technical Wrap-Up

We launched Pulse on October 24th, on schedule, albeit a little later in the day than we expected. One of the main reasons we did this app was to blog about the process and get some discussion going with our colleagues. This worked out pretty good but you did not hear as much from the technical side as you should of. This is definitely something we will do better if we do something like this again.

We chose September 24th through October 24th because we were balancing a lot of projects on the front end and I had a much needed shoulder surgery planned afterwards. We were wanting to do this application early in the fall, so that we could spend some focused time on Reflect through the end of the year and the beginning of the next.

This timeframe seemed to be pretty good especially considering that both Nate and I would be programming and the application should not really take a month program if we are sticking to our goals, but things don't always work out the way we plan.

Nate ended up not being able to program on the project at all due to other projects that we were involved with. These projects ended up taking a good chunk of my time as well. Needless to say a lot of this project was programmed in the last week and a half of our timeframe but everything came together nicely and on schedule.

Deployment and Launch Day

Our server was graciously donated by Global IP Networks which is a new venture from the same guys involved with Globalcon.net. We received our server about a week before the planned launch date. At that point I went ahead and installed a little bit of the production environment just to make sure everything was functioning properly.

When launch day came around, I had a number of items on my plate. These were to finish up a punch-list that Aaron had put on Basecamp, implement a few more features, finalize the production environment, and finally launch. I had already completed and tested my DNS changes because we were using a brand new domain name.

The punch-list included mostly straight forward items as well as a javascript issue that we had found the night before. The javascript issue was a major issue because it basically broke the adding and editing of payments. I can deal with most javascript issues but I was not sure of an immediate course of action for this problem. I made a gamble and went to sleep at a normal hour in hopes that a fresh and rested mind would solve the problem quicker. This gamble worked out great and I was soon to my other items early in the morning.

First I finished the punch-list and then I tackled the server setup. Things were wrapping up nicely, so we decided to work on another feature that we could slip in before launch. While the feature worked, we spent a few more hours on it than we wanted and there were also a few small issues with it that made us uncomfortable. Despite the time we put into it we decided it would be best to add this feature at a later time.

We decided to start pushing everything live at about 3:30 in the afternoon. At first everything seemed to work great, but then we noticed an issue with how the app scrolled through the months. This was not very fun because it was only an issue on the production server. Everything worked great on our development server as well as our local machines.This issue eluded me for many more hours than I would like to admit, but I was thankful that I had rested well the night before because otherwise my mind would have been clouded by both tiredness and rage.

Finally we launched the application. We then monitored it as people signed up and pushed a few more tweaks live.

New Features and Tweaks

We still have some new features and tweaks in the works. They will be coming after we get some good user feedback and have adequate time to implement them. We would love to hear any ideas that you may have that could make the application better.