Launch Day Reflections: Inside the First Production Release

The cool thing about working on a project is hitting a milestone. One of the most popular milestones is a deployment to production; in my case, it is the first deployment. It has been a bit of a long journey to get here. I was supposed to arrive a couple of months ago but got derailed by some production issues on the legacy application.

Prepped and ready to go

Nothing makes me more nervous than forgetting something important. Because of this, I try my best to document everything that I need as it comes up. Planning for production was no exception. I made sure to document any changes made to lower environments, like DEV and TEST, so that they could be applied to PROD. One of my favorite tools to use for this is OneNote by Microsoft. It does a good job of helping me organize my thoughts and tasks.

To further cover my bases, I made sure I had conversations with devs for the other team who regularly push deployments. They were extremely helpful because they filled in the gaps I was missing.. After those meetings, I felt even better about things. First production release? No problem.

Not so fast

I would love to tell you that everything went off without a hitch, but that certainly was not the case. During the shake-out testing, a few issues were pointed out to me. So naturally, I feverishly poured over the logs, searching for reason why things were not working as expected. The first issue looked like a data issue. I was able to work around that. The second issue involved me not refreshing the configuration server after making configuration updates; that’s a simple enough fix. The third issue is what had me the most frustrated. Because the data load is pretty big, I added in some caching. The cache is supposed to reset when a certain action is made on the UI. For some reason, the reset was not happening and the stale data was causing issues. Alas, this was something needed to be resolved with a code fix and deployment.

I’m not going to lie, it was pretty annoying, but I know it comes with the territory. The good thing is that my product is brand new and does not have many users yet. This mean I can fix things without impacting anybody. I ended up making the fix and deploying the code the next day. The following morning, the users were able to verify that everything was working properly… First Successful Production Release.

Processing the moment

I will admit, I do not feel an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction or accomplishment. Maybe because it took longer than expected. Maybe because it did not include everything I wanted. Or maybe because there is still so much to do and if it feels like this is just a checked box. I have the character flaw where I focus more on the failures instead of celebrating the successes. I often lose sleep if I make a mistake, trying to figure out how I could have avoided it. At some point, I’ll get around to celebrating. But for now, it’s on to Release 2!