We're celebrating our first official year of WebWiz@rd 3 here at REM and I thought it would be a great time to share some of my experience and thoughts related to it.
Alpha
- This was technically before the official year started. Our first year is AFTER the beta phase. :)
- The alpha stage was scary and exciting for me. Although I've had 10 years of experience building large scale projects, it's always nerve wracking to set a new one loose.
- We started with our own corporate website to gauge the stability of our migration scripts, our deployment scripts, the back end infrastructure and the front end rendering components.
- There were a lot of hidden "gotchas" as is always the case and the entire team pulled together to figure out strategies to deal with them.
- Most of the alpha time was spent deploying / erasing / deploying / erasing. It's more fun than it sounds, but more work than it would imply.
- We hammered out our official "Launch Modules" during this process and many of our late nights were punctuated with heated discussions about features and deadlines.
- We orchestrated our roll out plans and grouped our customers into groups - from easiest to migrate to hardest to migrate. (Spoiler: We've migrated almost a third of our customers at this point, so that takes care of *most* of the easy ones.)
- I personally consumed untold litres of coffee.
- Icons! We needed more Icons!
- We eventually settled on a version of code that was stable and feature packed and deployable and workable.
- We deployed one more time - with our REM website - and this time - we didn't erase it. We had officially started the beta phase - January 6, 2012.
Stay tuned for the exciting beta phase memoirs in my next post.
Photo Courtesy: Petr Kratochvil
